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Of all the digital animation that is produced, corporate videos and video games are possibly the most numerous form. The various visual styles of this non-advertisement based graphic content can be a rich source of material for artists.
Explore either video games or corporate video as your focus. Research several kinds of contemporary corporate video online that make use of animated elements or find examples of video games throughout history.

Make notes of the stylistic choices taken in each and the dates that these were made. Look at the composition of frame and narrative arc of the video as well as aesthetic choices of the graphics and animated elements. Using your chosen clips compile a video timeline of visual styles that develop from the 90s to the present.

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Of all the digital animation that is produced, corporate videos and video games are possibly the most numerous form. The various visual styles of this non-advertisement based graphic content can be a rich source of material for artists.
Explore either video games or corporate video as your focus. Research several kinds of contemporary corporate video online that make use of animated elements or find examples of video games throughout history.
Make notes of the stylistic choices taken in each and the dates that these were made. Look at the composition of frame and narrative arc of the video as well as aesthetic choices of the graphics and animated elements. Using your chosen clips compile a video timeline of visual styles that develop from the 90s to the present.

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Research 4.9: Video Games and Corporate Video

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Of all the digital animation that is produced, corporate videos and video games are possibly the most numerous form. The various visual styles of this non-advertisement based graphic content can be a rich source of material for artists.Explore either video games or corporate video as your focus.

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Best Cinemagraphs in Digital Marketing by Top Brands in 2017 | Flixel

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●Consider the difference between analogue and digital examples of morphing.
● Do you agree with Klein and Sobchak’s view? Can you find examples of animations to substantiate your view?
● What, if any, are the differences between an analogue approach to morphing and a digital approach?
Document your research and reflections on analogue and digital morphing with images and clips to illustrate your point and upload this to your learning log.

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TASK:
Academics, like Norman M Klein and Vivian Sobchack argue that there is an important difference between analogue morphing and digital morphing. They suggest that digital morphing programmes tend to smooth out glitches and hesitations more than analogue morphing.
Klein argues that the effects of seamless computer morphing; "displays less of the mercurial, the lighting hand and traced memories."
Klein and Sobchack also argue that analogue morphing can be used to express a 'poetics of loss' and anxiety about the organic disappearing into the industrial. An audience of analogue morphing is asked to think in terms of allegories of entropy and ruin, whereas digital morphing turns this sense of decay into a sense of fantasy.
● Consider the difference between analogue and digital examples of morphing.
● Do you agree with Klein and Sobchak's view? Can you find examples of animations to substantiate your view?
● What, if any, are the differences between an analogue approach to morphing and a digital approach?
Document your research and reflections on analogue and digital morphing with images and clips to illustrate your point and upload this to your learning log.
Analogue stop motion svankmeier dialogue

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Research 4.3: Morphing: analogue and digital

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TASK:Academics, like Norman M Klein and Vivian Sobchack argue that there is an important difference between analogue morphing and digital morphing. They suggest that digital morphing programmes tend to smooth out glitches and hesitations more than analogue morphing.

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What is a Cinemagraph? | People React to Seeing Cinemagraphs for the First Time

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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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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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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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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

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How to Create a Cinemagraph in Photoshop

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Best Cinemagraphs of August 2021| Flixel

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Cinemagraph Tutorial  |  The EASY way to make CINEMAGRAPHS for Instagram

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Best Cinemagraphs of April 2021 | Flixel

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Create Amazing CINEMAGRAPHS with VIDEO in After Effects | Tutorial

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Best Cinemagraphs of March 2021 | Flixel

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Best Cinemagraphs of February 2021 | Flixel

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Best Cinemagraphs of January 2021 | Flixel

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Best Cinemagraphs in Digital Marketing by Top Brands in 2017 | Flixel

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Flixel: Best Cinemagraphs  - A Year in Review

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How to Make a Cinemagraph: 5 Tips with Jennifer O'Brien

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Cinemagraph Videos of Food and Drinks, Compilation of Animated Moving Images

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Heather Phillipson, Zero point garbage matte (2014)

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Heather Phillipson, Zero point garbage matte (2014)

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an odyssey through the inner ear and into the brain - upending perception, digital images, olympic sports and medical procedures.

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Andy Holden, Chewy Cosmos (Panels to the Walls of Heaven) (2013)

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Andy Holden, Chewy Cosmos (Panels to the Walls of Heaven) (2013)

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Chewy Cosmos (Panels to the Walls of Heaven)

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Film commissioned by TATE Media and Channel 4
3mins
Broadcast 28th Feb 2012 as part of Random Acts

Made from one years cuttings of images of make-up 
collected by my mum and I from woman's magazines, 
animated by hand using a scanner.

Sound track compossed by the Grubby Mitts (Holden/Illingworth) 2013

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Benjamin Popp, East Lake Sans Souci (2017)

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Benjamin Popp, East Lake Sans Souci (2017)

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A diary/travelogue film shot on super 16mm with differing frame rate transfers overlaid upon one another.

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TASK:
Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.
Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

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TASK:
Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.
Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

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TASK: Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

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TASK: To demonstrate that you fully grasp the concept of frame rates, write a short paragraph explaining the difference between slow motion and frames per second in your ongoing glossary of terms. Cite any web or literature references that you use.

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TASK: To demonstrate that you fully grasp the concept of frame rates, write a short paragraph explaining the difference between slow motion and frames per second in your ongoing glossary of terms. Cite any web or literature references that you use.

"Frame rate is the engine behind the cinematic lie."
Alice O'Connor

The amount of time each film frame remains on screen before being replaced by the following image needs to be high enough to create the illusion of movement.

The human brain can perceive between 10 and 12 individual frames every second. Anything faster than this makes our brains blend the frames together into an illusion of movement. This is the basis of animation and is called the 'Phi Phenomenon'.

The technology available today for cameras and playback allow for very high frame rates and there has been a trend in recent films (3D, CGI) to shoot and play back on frame rates much higher than those needed for the illusion of movement and those used in conventional cinema.

History of frame rates

In the early days of cinema, silent film frame rates varied widely. Cameras and projectors were often hand-cranked. Film strips were projected with a black shutter between each frame and in order for this black flicker of the screen (going dark every second frame) to be undetectable to audiences, each frame was flashed more than once (effectively played back as twos or threes).

Once sound was introduced, a more stable frame rate was required and the established rate became 24 frames per second (that is, each of the 12 frames needed for the Phi Phenomenon displayed twice, on twos). This set frame rate
came to dominate the way all cinema and moving image looked, and still mostly does.
TV: PAL and NTSC
When electronic frame rates came into being with television, problems with flicker and bandwidth were resolved by 'interlacing' frames in a comb-like fashion. Each frame would be refreshed at a rate set to the electrical alternating current (AC) of the country. 25fps (PAL) for countries operating on 50 hz AC - Africa, Europe, most of Asia and 30fps for countries operating on 60 hz AC (NTSC) the Americas and Japan.
Digital and CGI
With the introduction of digital media there were less structural reasons to limit what frame rates could be. Filmmakers have tried to push the 'temporal resolution' to increase 'realism' and decrease motion blur. Tests done on high frame rates such as 60fps were interpreted to produce stronger emotional responses in test audiences and frames as high as 120 fps have been developed (4K) and used in video games and sports broadcasts. Peter Jackson's CGI
animated and live action hybrid blockbuster The Hobbit (2012) was screened at 48 fps (frames per second), twice that of normal 24 fps speed. Jackson argued that this high frame rate made for a clearer, more 'real' film.
Questions
It's a moot point amongst audiences and critics what 'more real' means, particularly in the context of CGI. Audience members of The Hobbit complained of headaches and others complained that the 'high realism' of the film gave it the look of a 'made for TV movie'.

It is arguable that the incursion of animated CGI into almost every aspect of commercial narrative film and moving image is beginning to deconstruct the nature of cinema; drawing cinema away from its historically close relationship with literature and pulling it towards the world of computer games both in visual content and structural make up.

Most moving image and cinema are still recorded for playback at 24 fps; a cadence that remains for the time being, something that audiences are more comfortable with.

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TASK: To demonstrate that you fully grasp the concept of frame rates, write a short paragraph explaining the difference between slow motion and frames per second in your ongoing glossary of terms. Cite any web or literature references that you use.

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TASK:
Do you agree with Peter Jackson that high frame rates allow an audience to see more reality?
If so, do you think this is desirable? If not, what other motivation do film-makers and animators have in pushing for such high frame rates?
Use OCA’s discuss forums to share your thoughts and any animation references.

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TASK:
Do you agree with Peter Jackson that high frame rates allow an audience to see more reality?
If so, do you think this is desirable? If not, what other motivation do film-makers and animators have in pushing for such high frame rates?
Use OCA's discuss forums to share your thoughts and any animation references.

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TASK:Do you agree with Peter Jackson that high frame rates allow an audience to see more reality?If so, do you think this is desirable? If not, what other motivation do film-makers and animators have in pushing for such high frame rates?Use OCA's discuss forums to share your thoughts and any animation references.

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Compression or data compression is a digital process in which image or moving image information is reduced to make file sizes more manageable. Compression reduces file size by eliminating unused digital elements (lossless) or reducing less important information (lossy), such as subtle tones. Too much lossy compression can negatively affect image quality.

TASK:
Reflect on selected animations in relation to Steyerl’s views in
her essay, In Defence of the Poor Image.
Identify animations that uses good and/or bad image quality in interesting ways.
Write a short piece (written, audio or animated) that draws together your research and viewpoints on image quality. (Approximately 1500 words, 3 minutes audio or 1 minute video).

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TASK:
Identify animations that uses good and/or bad image quality in interesting ways. Write a short piece (written, audio or animated) that draws together your research and viewpoints on image quality. Your essay can be presented in written, audio or video form (Approximately 1500 words, 3 minutes audio or 1 minute video).

Reflect on these animations in relation to Steyerl's quotes above and look up and
read her essay, In Defence of the Poor Image .Illustrate with images if needed.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

. For additional context, you may want to review Alan Warburton's videos Spectacle, Speculation, Spam and Goodbye Uncanny Valley from the previous exercise.

Compression or data compression is a digital process in which image or moving image information is reduced to make file sizes more manageable. Compression reduces file size by eliminating unused digital elements (lossless) or reducing less important information (lossy), such as subtle tones. Too much lossy compression can negatively affect image quality.

Image quality

"The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak."
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image (2009)

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TASK:Identify animations that uses good and/or bad image quality in interesting ways. Write a short piece (written, audio or animated) that draws together your research and viewpoints on image quality. Your essay can be presented in written, audio or video form (Approximately 1500 words, 3 minutes audio or 1 minute video).

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“The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak.”
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image (2009)

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

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The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.

Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies' shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images-their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable-that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.

1. Low Resolutions

In one of Woody Allen's films the main character is out of focus. It's not a technical problem but some sort of disease that has befallen him: his image is consistently blurred. Since Allen's character is an actor, this becomes a major problem: he is unable to find work. His lack of definition turns into a material problem. Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one's value as an image.

The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution. Just look at any electronics store and this system, described by Harun Farocki in a notable 2007 interview, becomes immediately apparent.In the class society of images, cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-end products are marketed in an upscale environment. More affordable derivatives of the same images circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television or online, as poor images.

Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak. Now, even consumer formats are increasingly adapting to the tastes of cineastes and esthetes, who insisted on 35 mm film as a guarantee of pristine visuality. The insistence upon analog film as the sole medium of visual importance resounded throughout discourses on cinema, almost regardless of their ideological inflection. It never mattered that these high-end economies of film production were (and still are) firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly male genius, and the original version, and thus are often conservative in their very structure. Resolution was fetishized as if its lack amounted to castration of the author. The cult of film gauge dominated even independent film production. The rich image established its own set of hierarchies, with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it.

2. Resurrection (as Poor Images)

But insisting on rich images also had more serious consequences. A speaker at a recent conference on the film essay refused to show clips from a piece by Humphrey Jennings because no proper film projection was available. Although there was at the speaker's disposal a perfectly standard DVD player and video projector, the audience was left to imagine what those images might have looked like.

In this case the invisibility of the image was more or less voluntary and based on aesthetic premises. But it has a much more general equivalent based on the consequences of neoliberal policies. Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neoliberal restructuring of media production began slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, to the point where experimental and essayistic cinema became almost invisible. As it became prohibitively expensive to keep these works circulating in cinemas, so were they also deemed too marginal to be broadcast on television. Thus they slowly disappeared not just from cinemas, but from the public sphere as well. Video essays and experimental films remained for the most part unseen save for some rare screenings in metropolitan film museums or film clubs, projected in their original resolution before disappearing again into the darkness of the archive.

This development was of course connected to the neoliberal radicalization of the concept of culture as commodity, to the commercialization of cinema, its dispersion into multiplexes, and the marginalization of independent filmmaking. It was also connected to the restructuring of global media industries and the establishment of monopolies over the audiovisual in certain countries or territories. In this way, resistant or non-conformist visual matter disappeared from the surface into an underground of alternative archives and collections, kept alive only by a network of committed organizations and individuals, who would circulate bootlegged VHS copies amongst themselves. Sources for these were extremely rare-tapes moved from hand to hand, depending on word of mouth, within circles of friends and colleagues. With the possibility to stream video online, this condition started to dramatically change. An increasing number of rare materials reappeared on publicly accessible platforms, some of them carefully curated (Ubuweb) and some just a pile of stuff (YouTube).

At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker's film essays available online. If you want a retrospective, you can have it. But the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think it necessary. And the results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2P platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs of artists' viewing copies are bartered. Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. Whether they like it or not.

3. Privatization and Piracy

That rare prints of militant, experimental, and classical works of cinema as well as video art reappear as poor images is significant on another level. Their situation reveals much more than the content or appearance of the images themselves: it also reveals the conditions of their marginalization, the constellation of social forces leading to their online circulation as poor images. Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images-their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement.

Obviously, this condition is not only connected to the neoliberal restructuring of media production and digital technology; it also has to do with the post-socialist and postcolonial restructuring of nation states, their cultures, and their archives. While some nation states are dismantled or fall apart, new cultures and traditions are invented and new histories created. This obviously also affects film archives-in many cases, a whole heritage of film prints is left without its supporting framework of national culture. As I once observed in the case of a film museum in Sarajevo, the national archive can find its next life in the form of a video-rental store. Pirate copies seep out of such archives through disorganized privatization. On the other hand, even the British Library sells off its contents online at astronomical prices.

As Kodwo Eshun has noted, poor images circulate partly in the void left by state-cinema organizations who find it too difficult to operate as a 16/35-mm archive or to maintain any kind of distribution infrastructure in the contemporary era. From this perspective, the poor image reveals the decline and degradation of the film essay, or indeed any experimental and non-commercial cinema, which in many places was made possible because the production of culture was considered a task of the state. Privatization of media production gradually grew more important than state controlled/sponsored media production. But, on the other hand, the rampant privatization of intellectual content, along with online marketing and commodification, also enable piracy and appropriation; it gives rise to the circulation of poor images.

4. Imperfect Cinema

The emergence of poor images reminds one of a classic Third Cinema manifesto, For an Imperfect Cinema, by Juan García Espinosa, written in Cuba in the late 1960s. Espinosa argues for an imperfect cinema because, in his words, "perfect cinema-technically and artistically masterful-is almost always reactionary cinema." The imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author. It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic.

In his manifesto, Espinosa also reflects on the promises of new media. He clearly predicts that the development of video technology will jeopardize the elitist position of traditional filmmakers and enable some sort of mass film production: an art of the people. Like the economy of poor images, imperfect cinema diminishes the distinctions between author and audience and merges life and art. Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.

In some way, the economy of poor images corresponds to the description of imperfect cinema, while the description of perfect cinema represents rather the concept of cinema as a flagship store. But the real and contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had anticipated. On the one hand, the economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of worldwide distribution and its ethics of remix and appropriation, enables the participation of a much larger group of producers than ever before. But this does not mean that these opportunities are only used for progressive ends. Hate speech, spam, and other rubbish make their way through digital connections as well. Digital communication has also become one of the most contested markets-a zone that has long been subjected to an ongoing original accumulation and to massive (and, to a certain extent, successful) attempts at privatization.

The networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia. While the territory of poor images allows access to excluded imagery, it is also permeated by the most advanced commodification techniques. While it enables the users' active participation in the creation and distribution of content, it also drafts them into production. Users become the editors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors of poor images.

Poor images are thus popular images-images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission. Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.

In this light, perhaps one has to redefine the value of the image, or, more precisely, to create a new perspective for it. Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor images are poor because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed. But they also express a condition of dematerialization, shared not only with the legacy of conceptual art but above all with contemporary modes of semiotic production. Capital's semiotic turn, as described by Felix Guattari, plays in favor of the creation and dissemination of compressed and flexible data packages that can be integrated into ever-newer combinations and sequences.

This flattening-out of visual content-the concept-in-becoming of the images-positions them within a general informational turn, within economies of knowledge that tear images and their captions out of context into the swirl of permanent capitalist deterritorialization. The history of conceptual art describes this dematerialization of the art object first as a resistant move against the fetish value of visibility. Then, however, the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the semioticization of capital, and thus to the conceptual turn of capitalism. In a way, the poor image is subject to a similar tension. On the one hand, it operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.

5. Comrade, what is your visual bond today?

But, simultaneously, a paradoxical reversal happens. The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema-to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.

The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history. It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the "original," but on the transience of the copy. It is no longer anchored within a classical public sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation state or corporation, but floats on the surface of temporary and dubious data pools. By drifting away from the vaults of cinema, it is propelled onto new and ephemeral screens stitched together by the desires of dispersed spectators.

The circulation of poor images thus creates "visual bonds," as Dziga Vertov once called them. This "visual bond" was, according to Vertov, supposed to link the workers of the world with each other. He imagined a sort of communist, visual, Adamic language that could not only inform or entertain, but also organize its viewers. In a sense, his dream has come true, if mostly under the rule of a global information capitalism whose audiences are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual excitement, affective attunement, and anxiety.

But there is also the circulation and production of poor images based on cell phone cameras, home computers, and unconventional forms of distribution. Its optical connections-collective editing, file sharing, or grassroots distribution circuits-reveal erratic and coincidental links between producers everywhere, which simultaneously constitute dispersed audiences.

The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect. The circulation of poor images thus initiates another chapter in the historical genealogy of nonconformist information circuits: Vertov's "visual bonds," the internationalist workers pedagogies that Peter Weiss described in The Aesthetics of Resistance, the circuits of Third Cinema and Tricontinentalism, of non-aligned filmmaking and thinking. The poor image-ambivalent as its status may be-thus takes its place in the genealogy of carbon-copied pamphlets, cine-train agit-prop films, underground video magazines and other nonconformist materials, which aesthetically often used poor materials. Moreover, it reactualizes many of the historical ideas associated with these circuits, among others Vertov's idea of the visual bond.

Imagine somebody from the past with a beret asking you, "Comrade, what is your visual bond today?"

You might answer: it is this link to the present.

6. Now!

The poor image embodies the afterlife of many former masterpieces of cinema and video art. It has been expelled from the sheltered paradise that cinema seems to have once been. After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travelers in a digital no-man's land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes even losing names and credits along the way.

Now many of these works are back-as poor images, I admit. One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then-please, anybody-show me this real thing.

The poor image is no longer about the real thing-the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.

In short: it is about reality.

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In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10

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A presentation I made for the Edge of Frame Weekend seminar at The Whitechapel gallery in East London, December 2016. Artists, curators and academics were asked to explore where experimental animation practice sits in relation to independent animation, visual art, histories and institutions. Rather than presenting papers, we were challenged to cite up to three works that illustrated our case.

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It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real... but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is... what happens now? 

CREDITS:

Written and animated by Alan Warburton with the support of Tom Pounder and Wieden + Kennedy. 
Music by Cool 3D World (http://cool3dworld.com/)
Special thanks to: Leanne Redfern, Nico Engelbrecht, Iain Tait, Indiana Matine, Katrina Sluis, David Surman, Jacob Gaboury and Daniel Rourke.

Animated backgrounds generously provided by:

•	Quixel (https://quixel.se/)
•	Katarina Markovic (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcr4QTtAK9N96pf_Z_zVqWg)
•	Roman Senko (https://vimeo.com/rendan)
 
Featuring work by:

•	Al and Al (http://www.alandal.co.uk/)
•	Albert Omoss (http://omoss.io/)
•	Alex McLeod (http://www.alxclub.com/)
•	Barry Doupe (http://www.barrydoupe.ca/)
•	Claudia Hart (http://www.claudiahart.com/)
•	Cool 3D World (http://cool3dworld.com/)
•	Dave Fothergill (https://vimeo.com/davefothergillvfx)
•	Dave Stewart (https://vimeo.com/davegrafix)
•	Drages Animation (https://www.youtube.com/user/drakhean)
•	El Popo Sangre (https://vimeo.com/elpoposangre)
•	Esteban Diacono (http://www.estebandiacono.com)
•	Eva Papamargariti (http://evapapamargariti.tumblr.com/)
•	Filip Tarczewski (https://vimeo.com/ftarczewski)
•	Geoffrey Lillemon (http://www.geoffreylillemon.com/website/)
•	Jacolby Satterwhite (http://jacolby.com/home.html)
•	Jesse Kanda (http://www.jessekanda.com/)
•	John Butler (https://vimeo.com/user3946359)
•	Jonathan Monaghan (http://jonmonaghan.com/)
•	Jun Seo Hahm (https://vimeo.com/junseohahm)
•	Kathleen Daniel (http://www.duh-real.com/)
•	Katie Torn (http://katietorn.com/index.html)
•	Kim Laughton (http://kimlaughton.tumblr.com/)
•	Kouhei Nakama (http://kouheinakama.com/)
•	LuYang (http://luyang.asia/)
•	Mike Pelletier (http://mikepelletier.net/)
•	Nic Hamilton (https://nichamilton.info/)
•	Pussykrew (http://hybrid-universe-emulation.net/)
•	Rick Silva (http://ricksilva.net/)
•	Sanatorios (https://www.instagram.com/sanatorios/)
•	Zeitguised (http://www.zeitguised.com)

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TASK
Artists Ryan Trecartin and Emma Calder both make use of social media as the source for their animation and video work. Each ask how cameras, social media, and reality TV have changed the way we engage with the world and with one another. Watch the videos made by both artists as a starting point to reflect on your own experience of social media.

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TASK
Artists Ryan Trecartin and Emma Calder both make use of social media as the source for their animation and video work. Each ask how cameras, social media, and reality TV have changed the way we engage with the world and with one another. Watch the videos made by both artists as a starting point to reflect on your own experience of social media.

Emma Calder, Everyone is waiting for Something to Happen (2016):

Ryan Trecartin, Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me (2006)

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TASK Artists Ryan Trecartin and Emma Calder both make use of social media as the source for their animation and video work. Each ask how cameras, social media, and reality TV have changed the way we engage with the world and with one another.

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Emma Calder: Everyone is waiting for something to happen

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Emma Calder: Everyone is waiting for something to happen

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See Emma Calder's website:

https://www.pearlyoyster.com

Description on vimeo:

Prior to being diagnosed with bowel cancer Richard Wright, an artist/animator, had a social media persona that was characterised by annoying and anarchic humour. After initially feeling unable to communicate at all, his general healing process became entwined with the resurrection of his social media presence, helped by an obsessive regime of cooking and baking.

The film uses character and abstract animation, created from collages of Richards photos and quotes posted on social media including a fifty two page blog which he wrote for a bowel cancer forum and interviews with Richard talking about his posts.

The result is a humorous and visually stimulating film that explores one creative individuals strategy for coping with a life threatening illness and how he was able to share this with his social media community.

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Everyone is waiting for something to happen (Official Trailer)

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Prior to being diagnosed with bowel cancer Richard Wright, an artist/animator, had a social media persona that was characterised by annoying and anarchic humour. After initially feeling unable to communicate at all, his general healing process became entwined with the resurrection of his social media presence, helped by an obsessive regime of cooking and baking.
The film uses character and abstract animation, created from collages of Richards photos and quotes posted on social media including a fifty two page blog which he wrote for a bowel cancer forum and interviews with Richard talking about his posts.
The result is a humorous and visually stimulating film that explores one creative individuals strategy for coping with a life threatening illness and how he was able to share this with his social media community.
The Film was commissioned as part of a competition “Reellives” to make a film exclusively based on a chosen person's social media data. It is part of a EPSRC UK research project being delivered by The University of Birmingham, The Open University and The University of Edinburgh Informatics.
Emma Calder has worked as a Animation Director, Artist, Graphic Designer and Lecturer. She has written, designed and illustrated books, for both adults and children. This is her second documentary film.

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Ryan Trecartin Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me (2006)

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Ryan Trecartin Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me (2006)

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Description on ubuweb:

Trecartin describes (Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me) as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin's intense visualization of electronic communication is inhabited by a cast of stylized characters: Pam, a Jewish lesbian librarian with a screaming baby in an ultra-modern hotel room; Tammy and Beth, who live in an apartment filled with installation art; and Tommy, who is seen in a secluded lake house in the woods. Pam, Tommy and Tammy are all played by Trecartin, who, wearing his signature make-up, jumps back and forth between male and female roles.

Totally self-absorbed and equipped with vestigial attention spans, the characters are constantly communicating with one another on the phone or online. Their e-mail exchanges and Internet searches are channeled into bright animations that intersect with the "real world" locations. The story moves from person to person like a browser surfing through Web pages. Engrossed in manic electronic interactions, the characters become increasingly isolated and solipsistic.

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UbuWeb Film & Video: Ryan Trecartin - (Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me) (2006)

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2006, 7:15 min, color, sound Trecartin describes (Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me) as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail."

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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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Analogue (from the Greek ana-logos meaning “proportion” or “ratio”). The continuous physical relationship between the original message and its reproduction. Speech and writing are represented by print in a book; light bounces off an object and is focused by a camera lens, changing the colours of chemicals on film. These are one-to-one correspondences between a signal and its translation into a physical medium.

Digital (from the Latin digitus -finger or toe) implies the medium of binary digits (bits) that computers use to process information. Two states, ‘On’ and ‘Off’ are represented by 0 and 1 to code all types of digital information. Digital is not a continuous stream, as with analogue signals but a set of information.

Analog media can no longer mean what it did in the pre-digital era, but now stands in relation to the dominant digital animation culture.

Allan Warburton argues that:

in mainstream media, as in art production, analogue practice is often fetishized, with the traditional idea of craft being amplified into spectacle.

Tonya Jameson:

“Creating something with our hands gives us a false sense of control at a time when we have little”

Fiona Hackney:
the popularity of craft in media production

“may be read as a means of addressing the problems and anxieties surrounding the acceleration of modern life (unemployment, the strain of new work processes and their effects on physical and mental life)”

“This is a file, which was unintentionally downloaded from my brain, 14355 days after my birth, around twenty minutes past four in the afternoon, and was forgotten to delete.”

Alex Heim on 14355_16_23_05.rts (2015)
See vimeo page

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TASK: Find some analogue and digital animations to compare and contrast their visual qualities. You could look at early cartoons and their later digital remakes or compare CGI animations with claymation.
Look at their visual qualities and consider what is lost or gained. Can you
obviously tell that one is digital and the other hand crafted and what visual clues give this away? What does each offer in terms of the image they present.
Add your research notes and reflections to your learning log.

Analogue (from the Greek ana-logos meaning "proportion" or "ratio"). The continuous physical relationship between the original message and its reproduction. Speech and writing are represented by print in a book; light bounces off an object and is focused by a camera lens, changing the colours of chemicals on film. These are one-to-one correspondences between a signal and its translation into a physical medium.

Digital (from the Latin digitus -finger or toe) implies the medium of binary digits (bits) that computers use to process information. Two states, 'On' and 'Off' are represented by 0 and 1 to code all types of digital information. Digital is not a continuous stream, as with analogue signals but a set of information.

Analog media can no longer mean what it did in the pre-digital era, but now stands in relation to the dominant digital animation culture.

Allan Warburton argues that:

in mainstream media, as in art production, analogue practice is often fetishized, with the traditional idea of craft being amplified into spectacle.

Tonya Jameson:

"Creating something with our hands gives us a false sense of control at a time when we have little"

Fiona Hackney:
the popularity of craft in media production

"may be read as a means of addressing the problems and anxieties surrounding the acceleration of modern life (unemployment, the strain of new work processes and their effects on physical and mental life)"

"This is a file, which was unintentionally downloaded from my brain, 14355 days after my birth, around twenty minutes past four in the afternoon, and was forgotten to delete."

Alex Heim on 14355_16_23_05.rts (2015)
See vimeo page

Motion Capture

In the 1880s, Etienne-Jules Marey attempted to record pure movement. He invented a 'geometric chronophotographic' system to isolate graphic
representations of movement that were discrete from the original subject. In one example (pictured above) he attached a multiple cross section of white sticks to his subject's back and photographed the subject walking. The subject was dressed completely in black and placed before a black background. In the
resulting images the person would 'disappear' leaving only the denoting white lines. These lines were then composited onto a single photographic plate, which Marey took to represent 'pure movement'.

Current motion- capture software and technology uses essentially the same approach either magnetic or optically based. Both systems rely on placing points
on an actor or subject, then reading the motion by a series of sensors or cameras. This technology was used in James Cameron's animated feature film
Avatar (2009).

Other types of motion capture (mocap systems) 'directly measure joint angles of rods and potentiometers' which provide a recording of movement abstracted from the original form. A similar process referred to as video-based motion capture, allows one to extract pure movement information from already existing film or video footage. Motion capturing has found its way into everyday appliances from video games systems to mobile devices. Each of these motion capture systems represents a significant shift in the recording of 'pure motion' and an effective method by which to consider movement abstracted from form

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TASK: Find some analogue and digital animations to compare and contrast their visual qualities. You could look at early cartoons and their later digital remakes or compare CGI animations with claymation.Look at their visual qualities and consider what is lost or gained.

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Compositing is a digital process where two or more image sequences are combined in order to build a single scene out of multiple layers. A common simple form of compositing is the addition of titles to a video. In order to create layers of video, the editing software needs to be instructed as to which parts of which images should be seen and which parts.

The history of digital compositing

1898 George Melies in his 1898 film Un Homme de Têtes was the first to use a Compositing Matte special effect. Multiple exposures were used to combine more than one frame together: by blacking out part of the frame using blocks of painted glass and placing these blocks where the heads would later be positioned and re-filmed, he then rewound the film and this time painted a black matte on
everything else in the frame, exposing only the part of the frame that had initially been kept unexposed by the squares of black glass. This resulting double exposure allowed for two or more images to co-exist within a single frame (a
composite frame).

Early 1900s techniques for superimposing images onto a shot developed quickly

1903 The Great Train Robbery and many other popular films used Melies' ‘in camera’ special matte effect.

‘glass shot’ ‘real world compositing’: an augmented set was overlaid by painting scenery onto glass in front of the camera.

black matte effect: glass in the frame was painted black so that detailed scenery could be added later and superimposed over these black/non-exposed parts of the film. The difficulty with this technique was that for the illusion to work, each shot needed to be static and no action could pass the line of the painted silhouette.

1920-1940s: travel matte and keying
Travel matte technology became a field of intense experimentation and competition with the use of different lights and ways of separating or ‘keying’ subjects from their background for superimposition into a different scene.
1927  F.W Murnau’s film Sunrise (1927). The actors were shot against an entirely black background and their silhouettes were then superimposed onto a scene.
1933 The Invisible Man (1933). The actor wore a black velvet suit and was filmed against a black background. Later the same footage was exposed by filming the set and other characters to create the effect of a partially ‘invisible man’.
1933 King Kong and 1940 The Thief of Bagdad: use of coloured lights to separate subjects from their background.

Digital developments; 'green screening'

Once digital video started to replace celluloid, the separation of signals and colours took on a mathematical approach– colours were interpreted and ‘keyed’ so that certain colour signals eg green were interpreted by the computer to be
transparent. Green is most often chosen over blue because it is a less common colour in costumes and can be used outdoors (against a blue sky), and because digital
cameras are by design more sensitive to green light.

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Look at the work of animators who use compositing techniques. Reference some of the names mentioned in the preceding text and below are some examples of artists who work with compositing.

Heather Phillipson, Zero point garbage matte (2014)

Andy Holden, Chewy Cosmos (Panels to the Walls of Heaven) (2013)

Benjamin Popp, East Lake Sans Souci (2017)

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Research 4.2: Compositing: Masks and Mattes

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Look at the work of animators who use compositing techniques. Reference some of the names mentioned in the preceding text and below are some examples of artists who work with compositing.

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The drive towards more reality: frame-rates revisited

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The drive towards more reality: frame-rates revisited

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“Frame rate is the engine behind the cinematic lie.”
Alice O’Connor

The amount of time each film frame remains on screen before being replaced by the following image needs to be high enough to create the illusion of movement.

The human brain can perceive between 10 and 12 individual frames every second. Anything faster than this makes our brains blend the frames together into an illusion of movement. This is the basis of animation and is called the ‘Phi Phenomenon’.

The technology available today for cameras and playback allow for very high frame rates and there has been a trend in recent films (3D, CGI) to shoot and play back on frame rates much higher than those needed for the illusion of movement and those used in conventional cinema.

History of frame rates

In the early days of cinema, silent film frame rates varied widely. Cameras and projectors were often hand-cranked. Film strips were projected with a black shutter between each frame and in order for this black flicker of the screen (going dark every second frame) to be undetectable to audiences, each frame was flashed more than once (effectively played back as twos or threes).

Once sound was introduced, a more stable frame rate was required and the established rate became 24 frames per second (that is, each of the 12 frames needed for the Phi Phenomenon displayed twice, on twos). This set frame rate
came to dominate the way all cinema and moving image looked, and still mostly does.

TV: PAL and NTSC

When electronic frame rates came into being with television, problems with flicker and bandwidth were resolved by ‘interlacing’ frames in a comb-like fashion. Each frame would be refreshed at a rate set to the electrical alternating current (AC) of the country. 25fps (PAL) for countries operating on 50 hz AC - Africa, Europe, most of Asia and 30fps for countries operating on 60 hz AC (NTSC) the Americas and Japan.

Digital and CGI

With the introduction of digital media there were less structural reasons to limit what frame rates could be. Filmmakers have tried to push the ‘temporal resolution’ to increase ‘realism’ and decrease motion blur. Tests done on high frame rates such as 60fps were interpreted to produce stronger emotional responses in test audiences and frames as high as 120 fps have been developed (4K) and used in video games and sports broadcasts. Peter Jackson’s CGI
animated and live action hybrid blockbuster The Hobbit (2012) was screened at 48 fps (frames per second), twice that of normal 24 fps speed. Jackson argued that this high frame rate made for a clearer, more ‘real’ film.

Questions

It’s a moot point amongst audiences and critics what ‘more real’ means, particularly in the context of CGI. Audience members of The Hobbit complained of headaches and others complained that the ‘high realism’ of the film gave it the look of a ‘made for TV movie’.

It is arguable that the incursion of animated CGI into almost every aspect of commercial narrative film and moving image is beginning to deconstruct the nature of cinema; drawing cinema away from its historically close relationship with literature and pulling it towards the world of computer games both in visual content and structural make up.

Most moving image and cinema are still recorded for playback at 24 fps; a cadence that remains for the time being, something that audiences are more comfortable with.

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In the 1880s, Etienne-Jules Marey attempted to record pure movement. He invented a ‘geometric chronophotographic’ system to isolate graphic representations of movement that were discrete from the original subject. In one example (pictured above) he attached a multiple cross section of white sticks to his subject’s back and photographed the subject walking. The subject was dressed completely in black and placed before a black background. In the
resulting images the person would ‘disappear’ leaving only the denoting white lines. These lines were then composited onto a single photographic plate, which Marey took to represent ‘pure movement’.

Current motion- capture software and technology uses essentially the same approach either magnetic or optically based. Both systems rely on placing points on an actor or subject, then reading the motion by a series of sensors or cameras. This technology was used in James Cameron’s animated feature film Avatar (2009).

Other types of motion capture (mocap systems) ‘directly measure joint angles of rods and potentiometers’ which provide a recording of movement abstracted from the original form. A similar process referred to as video-based motion capture, allows one to extract pure movement information from already existing film or video footage. Motion capturing has found its way into everyday appliances from video games systems to mobile devices. Each of these motion capture systems represents a significant shift in the recording of ‘pure motion’ and an effective method by which to consider movement abstracted from form

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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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For an imperfect cinema

by Julio García Espinosa,
translated by Julianne Burton

from Jump Cut, no. 20, 1979, pp. 24-26
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1979, 2005

This translation, based on the original essay as published in number 66/67 of Cine cubano, is substantially different from the other English-language version published in the summer 1971 issue of the now defunct British film magazine Afterimage, where various sentences and paragraphs were omitted with no acknowledgment of the deletions.

**********

Nowadays, perfect cinema - technically and artistically masterful - is almost always reactionary cinema. The major temptation facing Cuban cinema at this time - when it is achieving its objective of becoming a cinema of quality, one which is culturally meaningful within the revolutionary process - is precisely that of transforming itself into a perfect cinema.

The "boom" of Latin American cinema - with Brazil and Cuba in the forefront, according to the applause and approval of the European intelligentsia - is similar, in the present moment, to the one of which the Latin American novel had previously been the exclusive benefactor. Why do they applaud us? There is no doubt that a certain standard of quality has been reached. Doubtless, there is a certain political opportunism, a certain mutual instrumentality. But without doubt there is also something more. Why should we worry about their accolades? Isn't the goal of public recognition a part of the rules of the artistic game? When it comes to artistic culture, isn't European recognition equivalent to worldwide recognition? Doesn't it serve art and our peoples as well when works produced by underdeveloped nations obtain such recognition?

Although it may seem curious, it is necessary to clarify the fact that this disquiet is not solely motivated by ethical concerns. As a matter of fact, the motivation is for the most part aesthetic, if indeed it is possible to draw such an arbitrary dividing line between both terms. When we ask ourselves why it is we who are the film directors and not the others, that is to say, the spectators, the question does not stem from an exclusively ethical concern. We know that we are filmmakers because we have been part of a minority which has had the time and the circumstances needed to develop, within itself, an artistic culture; and because the material resources of film technology are limited and therefore available to some, not to all. But what happens if the future holds the universalization of college level instruction, if economic and social development reduce the hours in the work day, if the evolution of film technology (there are already signs in evidence) makes it possible that this technology ceases being the privilege of a small few? What happens if the development of videotape solves the problem of inevitably limited laboratory capacity, if television systems with their potential for "projecting" independently of the central studio renders the ad infinitum construction of movie theaters suddenly superfluous?

What happens then is not only an act of social justice - the possibility for everyone to make films - but also a fact of extreme importance for artistic culture: the possibility of recovering, without any kinds of complexes or guilt feelings, the true meaning of artistic activity. Then we will be able to understand that art is one of mankind's "impartial" or "uncommitted" activities [via actívidad desinteresada]. That art is not work, and that the artist is not in the strict sense a worker. The feeling that this is so, and the impossibility of translating it into practice, constitutes the agony and at the same time the "pharisee-ism" of all contemporary art.

In fact, the two tendencies exist: those who pretend to produce cinema as an "uncommitted activity and those who pretend to justify it as a "committed" activity. Both find themselves in a blind alley.

Anyone engaged in an artistic activity asks himself at a given moment what the meaning is of whatever he is doing. The simple fact that this anxiety arises demonstrates that factors exist to motivate it - factors which, in turn, indicate that art does not develop freely. Those who persist in denying art a specific meaning feel the moral weight of their egoism. Those who, on the other hand, pretend to attribute one to it, buy off their bad conscience with social generosity. It makes no difference that the mediators (critics, theoreticians, etc.) try to justify certain cases. For the contemporary artist, the mediator is like an aspirin, a tranquilizer. As with a pill, the artist only temporarily gets rid of the headache. The sure thing, however, is that art, like a capricious little devil, continues to show its face sporadically in no matter which tendency.

No doubt it is easier to define art by what it is not than by what it is, assuming that one can talk about closed definitions not just for art but for any of life's activities. The spirit of contradiction permeates everything now. Nothing, and nobody lets himself be imprisoned in a picture frame, no matter how gilded. It is possible that art gives us a vision of society or of human nature and that, at the same time, it cannot be defined as a vision of society or of human nature. It is possible that a certain narcissism of consciousness - in recognizing in oneself a little historical, sociological, psychological, philosophical consciousness - is implicit in aesthetic pleasure, and at the same time that this sensation is not sufficient in itself to explain aesthetic pleasure.

Is it not much closer to the nature of art to conceive of it as having its own cognitive power? In other words, by saying that art is not the "illustration" of ideas, which can also be expressed through philosophy, sociology, psychology. Every artist's desire to express the inexpressible is nothing more than the desire to express the vision of a theme in terms that are inexpressible through other than artistic means. Perhaps the cognitive power of art is like the power of a game for a child. Perhaps aesthetic pleasure lies in sensing the functionality (without a specific goal) of our intelligence and our own sensitivity. Art can stimulate, in general, the creative function of man. It can function as constant stimulus toward adopting an attitude of change with regard to life. But, as opposed to science, it enriches us in such a way that its results are not specific and cannot be applied to anything in particular. It is for this reason that we can call it an "impartial" or "uncommitted" activity, and can say that art is not strictly speaking a "job," and that the artist is perhaps the least intellectual of all intellectuals.

Why then does the artist feel the need to justify himself as a "worker," as an "intellectual," as a "professional," as a disciplined and organized man, like any other individual who performs a productive task? Why does he feel the need to exaggerate the importance of his activity? Why does he feel the need to have critics (mediators) to justify him, to defend him, to interpret him? Why does he speak proudly of "my critics"? Why does he find it necessary to make transcendental declarations, as if he were the true interpreter of society and of mankind? Why does he pretend to consider himself critic and conscience of society when (although these objectives can be implicit or even explicit in certain circumstances) in a truly revolutionary society all of us - that is to say, the people as a whole - should exercise those functions? And why, on the other hand, does the artist see himself forced to limit these objectives, these attitudes, these characteristics? Why does he at the same time set up these limitations as necessary to prevent his work from being transformed into a tract or a sociological essay? What is behind such pharisee-ism? Why protect oneself and seek recognition as a (revolutionary, it must be understood) political and scientific worker, yet not be prepared to run the same risks.

The problem is a complex one. Basically, it is neither a matter of opportunism nor cowardice. A true artist is prepared to run any risk as long as he is certain that his work will not cease to be an artistic expression. The only risk which he will not accept is that of endangering the artistic quality of his work.

There are also those who accept and defend the "impartial" function of art. These people claim to be more consistent. They opt for the bitterness of a closed world in the hope that tomorrow history will justify them. But the fact is that even today not everyone can enjoy the Mona Lisa. These people should have fewer contradictions; they should be less alienated. But in fact it is not so, even though such an attitude gives them the possibility of an alibi which is more productive on a personal level. In general they sense the sterility of their "purity" or they dedicate themselves to waging corrosive battles, but always on the defensive. They can even, in a reverse operation, reject their interest in finding tranquility, harmony, and a certain compensation in the work of art, expressing instead disequilibrium, chaos, and uncertainty, which also becomes the objective of "impartial" art.

What is it, then, which makes it impossible to practice art as an "impartial" activity? Why is this particular situation today more sensitive than ever? From the beginning of the world as we know it, that is to say, since the world was divided into classes, this situation has been latent. If it has grown sharper today it is precisely because today the possibility of transcending it is coming into view. Not through a prise de conscience, not through the expressed determination of any particular artist, but because reality itself has begun to reveal symptoms (not at all utopian) which indicate that "in the future there will no longer be painters, a rather men who, among other things, dedicate themselves to painting" (Marx).

There can be no "impartial" or "uncommitted" art, there can be no new and genuine qualitative jump in art, unless the concept and the reality of the "elite" is done away with once and for all. Three factors incline us toward optimism: the development of science, the social presence of the masses, and the revolutionary potential in the contemporary world. All three are without hierarchical order, all three are interrelated.

Why is science feared? Why are people afraid that art might be crushed under obvious productivity and utility of science? Why this inferiority complex? It is true that today we read a good essay with much greater pleasure than a novel. Why do we keep repeating then, horrified, that the world is becoming more mercenary, more utilitarian, more materialistic? Is it not really marvelous that the development of science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology is contributing to the "purification" of art? The appearance, thanks to science, of expressive media like photography and film made a greater "purification" of painting and theatre possible (without invalidating them artistically in the least). Doesn't modern day science render anachronistic so much "artistic" analysis of the human soul? Doesn't contemporary science allow us to free ourselves from so many fraudulent films, concealed behind what has been called the world of poetry? With the advance of science, art has nothing to lose; on the contrary, it has a whole world to gain. What, then, are we so afraid of? Science strips art bare, and it seems that it is not easy to go naked through the streets.

The real tragedy of the contemporary artist lies in the impossibility of practicing art as a minority activity. It is said - and correctly - that art cannot exercise its attraction without the cooperation of the subject. But what can be done so that the audience stops being an object and transforms itself into the subject?

The development of science, of technology, and of the most advanced social theory and practice has made possible as never before the active presence in the masses in social life. In the realm of artistic life, there are more spectators now than at any other moment in history. This is the first stage in the abolition of "elites." The task currently at hand is to find out if the conditions which will enable spectators to transform themselves into agents - not merely more active spectators, but genuine co-authors - are beginning to exist. The task at hand is to ask ourselves whether art is really an activity restricted to specialists, whether it is, through extra-human design, the option of a chosen few or a possibility for everyone.

How can we trust the perspectives and possibilities of art simply to the education of the people as a mass of spectators? Taste as defined by high culture, once it is "overdone," is normally passed on to the rest of society as leftovers to be devoured and ruminated over by those who were not invited to the feast. This eternal spiral has today become a vicious circle as well. "Camp" and its attitude toward everything outdated is an attempt to rescue these leftovers and to lessen the distance between high culture and the people. But the difference lies in the fact that camp rescues it as an aesthetic value, while for the people the values involved continue to be ethical ones.

Must the revolutionary present and the revolutionary future inevitably have "its" artists and "its" intellectuals, just as the bourgeoisie had "theirs"? Surely the truly revolutionary position, from now on, is to contribute to overcoming these elitist concepts and practices, rather than pursuing ad eternum the "artistic quality" of the work. The new outlook for artistic culture is no longer that everyone must share the taste of a few, but that all can be creators of that culture. Art has always been a universal necessity; what it has not been is an option for all under equal conditions. Parallel to refined art, popular art has had a simultaneous but independent existence.

Popular art has absolutely nothing to do with what is called mass art. Popular art needs and consequently tends to develop the personal, individual taste of a people. On the other hand, mass art (or art for the masses) requires the people to have no taste. It will only be genuine when it is actually the masses who create it, since at present it is art produced by a few for the masses. Grotowski says that today's theater should be a minority art form because mass art can be achieved through cinema. This is not true. Perhaps film is the most elitist of all the contemporary arts. Film today, no matter where, is made by a small minority for the masses. Perhaps film will be the art form which takes the longest time to reach the hands of the masses, when we understand mass art as popular art, art created by the masses. Currently, as Hauser points out, mass art is art produced by a minority in order to satisfy the demand of a public reduced to the sole role of spectator and consumer.

Popular art has always been created by the least learned sector of society, yet this "uncultured" sector has managed to conserve profoundly cultured characteristics of art. One of the most important of these is the fact that the creators are at the same time the spectators and vice versa. Between those who produce and those who consume, no sharp line of demarcation exists. Cultivated art, in our era, has also attained this situation. Modern art's great dose of freedom is nothing more than the conquest of a new interlocutor: the artist himself. For this reason, it is useless to strain oneself struggling for the substitution of the masses as a new and potential spectator for the bourgeoisie. This situation, maintained by popular art, adopted by cultivated art, must be dissolved and become the heritage of all. This and no other must be the great objective of an authentically revolutionary artistic culture.

Popular art preserved another even more important cultural characteristic: It is carried out as but another life activity. With cultivated art, the reverse is true. It is pursued as a unique, specific activity, as a personal achievement. This is the cruel price of having had to maintain artistic activity at the expense of its inexistence among the people. Hasn't the attempt to realize himself on the edge of society proved to be too painful a restriction for the artist and for art itself? To posit art as a sect, as a society within society, as the promised land where we can fleetingly fulfill ourselves for a brief instant - doesn't this create the illusion that self-realization on the level of consciousness also implies self-realization on the level of existence? Isn't this patently obvious in contemporary circumstances? The essential lesson of popular art is that it is carried out as a life activity: man must not fulfill himself as an artist but fully; the artist must not seek fulfillment as an artist but as a human being.

In the modern world, principally in developed capitalist nations and in those countries engaged in a revolutionary process, there are alarming symptoms, obvious signs of an imminent change. The possibilities for overcoming this traditional disassociation are beginning to arise. These symptoms are not a product of consciousness but of reality itself. A large part of the struggle waged in modern art has been, in fact, to "democratize" art. What other goal is entailed in combating the limitations of taste, museum art, and the demarcation lines between the creator and the public? What is considered beauty today, and where is it found? On Campbell's soup labels, in a garbage can lid, in gadgets? Even the eternal value of a work of art is today being questioned. What else could be the meaning of those sculptures, seen in recent exhibitions, made of blocks of ice, which melt away while the public looks at them? Isn't this - more than the disappearance of art - the attempt to make the spectator disappear? Don't those painters who entrust a portion of the execution of their work to just anyone, rather than to their disciples, exhibit an eagerness to jump over the barricade of "elitist" art? Doesn't the same attitude exist among composers whose works allow their performers ample liberty?

There's a widespread tendency in modern art to make the spectator participate ever more fully. If he participates to a greater and greater degree, where will the process end up? Isn't the logical outcome - or shouldn't it in fact be - that he will cease being a spectator altogether? This simultaneously represents a tendency toward collectivism and toward individualism. Once we admit the possibility of universal participation, aren't we also admitting the individual creative potential which we all have? Isn't Grotowski mistaken when he asserts that today's theater should be dedicated to an elite? Isn't it rather the reverse: that the theater of poverty in fact requires the highest refinement? It is the theater which has no need for secondary values: costumes, scenery, make-up, even a stage. Isn't this an indication that material conditions are reduced to a minimum and that, from this point of view, the possibility of making theater is within everyone's reach? And doesn't the fact that the theater has an increasingly smaller public mean that conditions are beginning to ripen for it to transform itself into a true mass theater? Perhaps the tragedy of the theater lies in the fact that it has reached this point in its evolution too soon.

When we look toward Europe, we wring our hands. We see that the old culture is totally incapable of providing answers to the problems of art. The fact is that Europe can no longer respond in a traditional manner but at the same time finds it equally difficult to respond in a manner that is radically new. Europe is no longer capable of giving the world a new "ism"; neither is it in a position to put an end to "isms" once and for all. So we think that our moment has come, that at last the underdeveloped can deck themselves out as "men of culture." Here lies our greatest danger and our greatest temptation. This accounts for the opportunism of some on our continent. For, given our technical and scientific backwardness and given the scanty presence of the masses in social life, our continent is still capable of responding in a traditional manner, by reaffirming the concept and the practice of elite art. Perhaps in this case the real motive for the European applause which some of our literary and cinematic works have won is none other than a certain nostalgia which we inspire. After all, the European has no other Europe to which to turn.

The third factor, the revolution - which is the most important of all - is perhaps present in our country as nowhere else. This is our only true chance. The revolution is what provides all other alternatives, what can supply an entirely new response, what enables us to do away once and for all with elitist concepts and practices in art. The revolution and the ongoing revolutionary process are the only factors which make the total and free presence of the masses possible. And this will mean the definitive disappearance of the rigid division of labor and of a society divided into sectors and classes. For us, then, the revolution is the highest expression of culture because it will abolish artistic culture as a fragmentary human activity.

Current responses to this inevitable future, this uncontestable prospect, can be as numerous as the countries on our continent. Because characteristics and achieved levels are not the same, each art form, every artistic manifestation, must find its own expression. What should be the response of the Cuban cinema in particular? Paradoxically, we think it will be a new poetics, not a new cultural policy. A poetics whose true goal will be to commit suicide, to disappear as such. We know, however, that in fact other artistic conceptions will continue to exist among us, just like small rural landholdings and religion continue to exist.

On the level of cultural policy we are faced with a serious problem: the film school. Is it right to continue developing a handful of film specialists? It seems inevitable for the present, but what will be the eternal quarry that we continue to mine: the students in Arts and Letters at the University? But shouldn't we begin to consider right now whether that school should have a limited lifespan? What end do we pursue there - a reserve corps of future artists? Or a specialized future public? We should be asking ourselves whether we can do something now to abolish this division between artistic and scientific culture.

What constitutes in fact the true prestige of artistic culture, and how did it come about that this prestige was allowed to appropriate the whole concept of culture? Perhaps it is based on the enormous prestige which the spirit has always enjoyed at the expense of the body. Hasn't artistic culture always been seen as the spiritual part of society while scientific culture is seen as its body? The traditional rejection of the body, of material life, is due in part to the concept that things of the spirit are more elevated, more elegant, serious and profound. Can't we, here and now, begin doing something to put an end to this artificial distinction? We should understand from here on in that the body and the things of the body are also elegant, and that material life is beautiful as well. We should understand that, in fact, the soul is contained in the body just as the spirit is contained in material life, just as - to speak in strictly artistic terms - the essence is contained in the surface and the content in the form.

We should endeavor to see that our future students, and therefore our future filmmakers, will themselves be scientists, sociologists, physicians, economists, agricultural engineers, etc., without of course ceasing to be filmmakers. And, at the same time, we should have the same aim for our most outstanding workers, the workers who achieve the best results in terms of political and intellectual formation. We cannot develop the taste of the masses as long as the division between the two cultures continues to exist, nor as long as the masses are not the real masters of the means of artistic production. The revolution has liberated us as an artistic sector. It is only logical that we contribute to the liberation of the private means of artistic production.

A new poetics for the cinema will, above all, be a "partisan" and "committed" poetics, a "committed" art, a consciously and resolutely "committed" cinema - that is to say, an "imperfect" cinema. An "impartial" or "uncommitted" (cinema), as a complete aesthetic activity, will only be possible when it is the people who make art. But today art must assimilate its quota of work so that work can assimilate its quota of art.

The motto of this imperfect cinema (which there's no need to invent, since it already exists) is, as Glauber Rocha would say, "We are not interested in the problems of neurosis; we are interested in the problems of lucidity." Art no longer has use for the neurotic and his problems, although the neurotic continues to need art - as a concerned object, a relief, an alibi or, as Freud would say, as a sublimation of his problems. A neurotic can produce art, but art has no reason to produce neurotics. It has been traditionally believed that the concerns of art were not to be found in the sane but in the sick, not in the normal but in the abnormal, not in those who struggle but in those who weep, not in lucid minds but in neurotic ones. Imperfect cinema is changing this way of
seeing the question. We have more faith in the sick man than in the healthy one because his truth is purged by suffering. However, there is no need for suffering to be synonymous with artistic elegance. There is still a trend in modern art - undoubtedly related to Christian tradition - which identifies seriousness with suffering. The specter of Marguerite Gautier still haunts artistic endeavor in our day. Only in the person who suffers do we perceive elegance, gravity, even beauty; only in him do we recognize the possibility of authenticity, seriousness, sincerity. Imperfect cinema must put an end to this tradition.

Imperfect cinema finds a new audience in those who struggle, and it finds its themes in their problems. For imperfect cinema, "lucid" people are the ones who think and feel and exist in a world which they can change. In spite of all the problems and difficulties, they are convinced that they can transform it in a revolutionary way. Imperfect cinema therefore has no need to struggle to create an "audience." On the contrary, it can be said that at present a greater audience exists for this kind of cinema than there are filmmakers able to supply that audience.

What does this new interlocutor require of us - an art full of moral examples worthy of imitation? No. Man is more of a creator than an innovator. Besides, he should be the one to give us moral examples. He might ask us for a fuller, more complete work, aimed - in a separate or coordinated fashion - at the intelligence, the emotions, the powers of intuition.

Should he ask us for a cinema of denunciation? Yes and no. No, if the denunciation is directed toward the others, if it is conceived that those who are not struggling might sympathize with us and increase their awareness. Yes, if the denunciation acts as information, as testimony, as another combat weapon for those engaged in the struggle. Why denounce imperialism to show one more time that it is evil? What's the use if those now fighting are fighting primarily against imperialism? We can denounce imperialism but should strive to do it as a way of proposing concrete battles. A film which denounces those who struggle against the evil deeds of an official who must be executed would be an excellent example of this kind of film-denunciation.

We maintain that imperfect cinema must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of a self-sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema which "beautifully illustrates" ideas or concepts which we already possess. (The narcissistic posture has nothing to do with those who struggle.) To show a process is not exactly equivalent to analyzing it. To analyze, in the traditional sense of the word, always implies a closed prior judgment. To analyze a problem is to show the problem (not the process) permeated with judgments which the analysis itself generates a priori. To analyze is to block off from the outset any possibility for analysis on the part of the interlocutor.

To show the process of a problem, on the other hand, is to submit it to judgment without pronouncing the verdict. There is a style of news reporting which puts more emphasis on the commentary than on the news item. There is another kind of reporting which presents the news and evaluates it through the arrangement of the item on the page or by its position in the paper. To show the process of a problem is like showing the very development of the news item, without commentary; it is like showing the multi-faceted evolution of a piece of information without evaluating it. The subjective element is the selection of the problem, conditioned as it is by the interest of the audience - which is the subject. The objective element is showing the process which is the object.

Imperfect cinema is an answer, but it is also a question which will discover its own answers in the course of its development. Imperfect cinema can make use of the documentary or the fictional mode, or both. It can use whatever genre, or all genres. It can use cinema as a pluralistic art form or as a specialized form of expression. These questions are indifferent to it, since they do not represent its real alternatives or problems, and much less its real goals. These are not the battles or polemics it is interested in sparking.

Imperfect cinema can also be enjoyable, both for the maker and for its new audience. Those who struggle do not struggle on the edge of life, but in the midst of it. Struggle is life and vice versa. One does not stuggle in order to live "later on." The struggle requires organization - the organization of life. Even in the most extreme phase, that of total and direct war, the organization of life is equivalent to the organization of the struggle. And in life, as in the struggle, there is everything, including enjoyment. Imperfect cinema can enjoy itself despite everything that conspires to negate enjoyment.

Imperfect cinema rejects exhibitionism in both (literal) senses of the word, the narcissistic and the commercial (getting shown in established theaters and circuits). It should be remembered that the death of the star-system turned out to be a positive thing for art. There is no reason to doubt that the disappearance of the director as star will fail to offer similar prospects. Imperfect cinema must start work now, in cooperation with sociologists, revolutionary leaders, psychologists, economists, etc. Furthermore, imperfect cinema rejects whatever services criticism has to offer and considers the function of mediators and intermediaries anachronistic.

Imperfect cinema is no longer interested in quality or technique. It can be created equally well with a Mitchell or with an 8mm camera, in a studio or in a guerrilla camp in the middle of the jungle. Imperfect cinema is no longer interested in predetermined taste, and much less in "good taste." It is not quality which it seeks in an artist's work. The only thing it is interested in is how an artist responds to the following question: What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the "cultured" elite audience which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?

The filmmaker who subscribes to this new poetics should not have personal self-realization as his object. From now on he should also have another activity. He should place his role as revolutionary or aspiring revolutionary above all else. In a word, he should try to fulfill himself as a man and not just as an artist, that its essential goal as a new poetics is to disappear. It is no longer a matter of replacing one school with another, one "ism" with another, poetry with anti-poetry, but of truly letting a thousand different flowers bloom. The future lies with folk art. But let us no longer display folk art with demagogic pride, with a celebrative air. Let us exhibit it instead as a cruel denunciation, as a painful testimony to the level at which the peoples of the world have been forced to limit their artistic creativity. The future, without doubt, will be with folk art, but then there will be no need to call it that, because nobody and nothing will any longer be able to again paralyze the creative spirit of the people.

Art will not disappear into nothingness; it will disappear into everything.

Havana, December 7, 1969

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
For an imperfect cinema by Julio García Espinosa, trans. by Julianne Burton

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For an imperfect cinema by Julio García Espinosa, translated by Julianne Burton from Jump Cut, no. 20, 1979, pp. 24-26 copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1979, 2005 This translation, based on the original essay as published in number 66/67 of Cine cubano, is substantially different from the other English-language version published in the summer 1971 issue of the now defunct British film magazine Afterimage, where various sentences and paragraphs were omitted with no acknowledgment of the deletions.

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With ruminations on drawing, colour and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy-tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, Hollywood Flatlands brings to light the links between animation, avant-garde art and modernist criticism.Focusing on the work of aesthetic and political revolutionaries of the inter-war period, Esther Leslie reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema.

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among the "Ten Most Anticipated Games of the Year" "Excellent and completely out there." "A Slow Year takes zen inspiration a step further, with four interactive haiku." Winner of the Virtuoso and Vanguard awards A Slow Year is a collection of four games, one for each season, about the experience of observing things.

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Fair Use, Copyright, Creative Commons and Public Domain

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Fair Use, Copyright, Creative Commons and Public Domain

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This project will require you to do research and to build your own catalogue of source material that you can use to construct animated video essays. Increasing numbers of artists work with found material, predominantly from the internet but from other sources too (scans of books, photographs and film).

When using found imagery in your own work there are moral and legal issues to consider. The two most important rules are:

Credit your sources and never pass off someone’s work as if it is your own.

Ask permission to use content where possible.

It is essential to credit any sources that you use. This can be done in the end credits of your piece, but is preferably done as an overlay of text on the screen as the quoted video appears.

Allan Warburton’s two video lectures are a good example of this. They are also a
useful introduction to the context in which animation artists are working today:
● Alan Warburton, Spectacle, Speculation, Spam (2016) :
http://alanwarburton.co.uk/spectacle-speculation-spam/
● Alan Warburton, Goodbye Uncanny Valley (2017):
http://alanwarburton.co.uk/goodbye-uncanny-valley/

Another option is to use material freely but to restrict the viewership of your work through using a password. Vimeo has a guide on how to do this:
https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/224817847-Privacy-settings-overview

Fair Use
If you think about copyright as a series of restrictions, fair use is a set of exceptions. Fair use is a fundamental part of the copyright bargain.
Copyright does not give owners unlimited control over their content.
Fair use is a set of factors and considerations that determine which things can be done without the permission of the copyright holder.

A search engine such as Google allows you to search for images particularly labelled for non-commercial reuse with modification. Remember to double-check the usage rights on any image or series of images that you use.

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A presentation I made for the Edge of Frame Weekend seminar at The Whitechapel gallery in East London, December 2016. Artists, curators and academics were asked to explore where experimental animation practice sits in relation to independent animation, visual art, histories and institutions. Rather than presenting papers, we were challenged to cite up to three works that illustrated our case.

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Spectacle, Speculation, Spam - Alan Warburton

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A presentation I made for the Edge of Frame Weekend seminar at The Whitechapel gallery in East London, December 2016. Artists, curators and academics were asked to explore where experimental animation practice sits in relation to independent animation, visual art, histories and institutions.

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“Traditional computer animation is non-linear. The animator tweaks and adjusts everything by going back and forth between different states of the animation. Thus, he (sic) is in control of the outcome. When simulating, however, the animator gives up control by outsourcing several tasks to the computer. The computer executes these tasks based on calculations and outputs a linear simulation result. The animator interacts with the computer and is in control only to a certain degree. Animating like this feels like real-life filmmaking: Like a real actor, the computer follows the action set by the animator and produces results that are unexpected, realistic, broken and personal. Accordingly, the focus shifts from outcome to process. The animator is left with the challenge to find the right balance between staying in control and leaving room for randomness.

Animation in Ugly is a combination of puppeteering and dynamic computer simulation and varies between physically accurate and broken. The Ugly characters are ragdolls built from interconnected dynamic body parts. To enable the characters to interact with the environment, the body parts are fixed to animated controllers via simulated strings.”

Nikita Diakur on Ugly (2017) European Film Academy

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Capsule vidéo #7,  Silvia Kolbowski, "Model Pleasure V", 1983

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Capsule vidéo #7,  Silvia Kolbowski, "Model Pleasure V", 1983

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Manifesto Marathon 2008: Silvia Kolbowski

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Manifesto Marathon 2008: Silvia Kolbowski

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Paul Sharits on illusionism and generative systems

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Paul Sharits on illusionism and generative systems

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