Confined projections
Dee, Jason (2016) Confined projections. [Exhibition/show, Film, Installation]
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As part of the International Festival of Projections (March 2016) we are organising ‘CONFINED PROJECTIONS’. Taking the Mutoscope - an early motion picture device- as leitmotiv, this project will investigate the conjunction of public/private, visibility/invisibility, and proximity/distance in the film experience. The Mutoscope dominated the coin-in-slot peep-show business in Britain during the turn of the century. Operating on the same principle of a flipbook —showing a reel of 1000 images— the device is hand-operated by one person at a time. The viewer is thus able to influence the cinematic temporality of the film, creating his/her own unique viewing experience in a tactile relationship with the cinematic apparatus.
Participating artists include: Elias Heuninck, Jason Dee, Katie McGown, Helen Kirwan & Simon Pruciak, José Fernandez Levy, and Sensate Films.
We are building six Mutoscopes (an early motion picture device). The device is hand-operated by one person at a time showing a reel of 1000 images.
The exhibition features 'Medium' by Jason Lee. Medium takes a shortclip from Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), showing an actor blowing a smoke ring, stretching its length from two seconds to three minutes.
The impossible duration of the exhaled breath suggests an alternative timescale, removed from both human and filmic rhythms. The fixed frames underlying cinematic motion are dissolved into malleable information that can be divided into ever-finer increments, blurring the divide between stillness and motion. The majority of this extended scene was never caught on film, yet it's impossible to tell which are the original recorded frames and which are the 'phantom' frames created by software algorithms.
The viscous smoke spilling out of the actor’s mouth resembles the 'ectoplasm' associated with 19th Century spiritualist photography. This era's ambiguous relationship between 'real' and imagined worlds marks a transition period where new technologies supposedly opened up zones previously invisible to the human eye. This work suggests a similar transition between 20th and 21st Century media
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