Bill Viola Interview and Marc Aschenbrenner's Zweite Sonne

I like Bill Viola's comparison of video cameras to reindeer bones with notches cut into them. He is profound in his assertion that its the telling of stories and leaving of objects that is the fundamental activity of human existence.



I recently attended the Düsseldorf and Köln art fairs and it was transparently clear that the contemporary art world is dominated by a marketplace driven by the collection of objects. What little video I did see I found remarkably boring and derivative, with the exception of Zweite Sonne by Marc Aschenbrenner on exhibit at the Olaf Stüber Gallery booth in Köln. It exhibited a property I would like to associate with my slowly developing theory of Quantinuity; namely that it transported an otherwise virtual object into physical space. The video was projected inside a giant black plastic balloon-suit that also appears in the video itself as the central subject of the video.

Eyeliner 3D

Is Eyeliner 3D really holography or just smoke and mirrors?
And does it even matter?

Given my background and formal education, as well as my admitted nostalgic love of certain masterpieces of celluloid cinema, it is challenging for me to conceive of my work in terms of depth. I have always been inclined to see 2-dimensional pictures in my head when imagining a story for a film. And I guess that's just it; proto-quantum cinema and/or live cinema are not really films at all; they may be "features" or even "feature-length" at times, but I am feeling more and more that the proto-quantum cinema will find its deepest roots in theater. Stumbling across technologies like Eyeliner 3D confirm this suspicion.

So while it may not be possible in my lifetime to realize true holographic projection (and certainly not nanopixels), several layers (perhaps as many in late-stage 32-bit video games) may be around the corner. The promise that these virtual layers of inszenierung may have for proto-quantum cinema may in fact cross the minimum thresholds of depth reconstruction necessary to truly define a new artform.

So do we really need absolute depth resolution? Or will foreground, midground and background (with some additional layers) suffice?

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest & In My Language

I just watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest for the first time in about seven years. I had always regarded this piece as an amazing character study and a beautifully shot human drama. Watching it today in 2007 I became painfully aware of its shortcomings in terms of its depictions of women as either tramps or sadistic bureaucrats. Yet its inability to be gender equitable bothered me less than its somehow predictable narrative structure and its blantantly ethnocentric construction of the Native American dilemma.

The salient points of the film which redeem it are its cinematography and stellar performances by a perfectly cast ensemble. The art of Milos Forman's directing was flawless; it is the script that poses a problem for me.

The main issue I find is that our theories of psychology and pharmacology have advanced considerably since Cuckoo's Nest was written. Shock therapy and lobotomies have been overshadowed by the pharmaceutical industry. Did the terms ADD and ADHD have relevance in the 70s the way they did in the 90s? I posit that the media landscape itself has had such a drastic effect on the collective human consciousness in the past thirty-odd years that it has made its depiction an entirely different proposition than it was when Cuckoo's Nest was made.

Created by an autistic woman, I find this video far more arresting and inspiring in today's media climate as a vision and interpretation of mental illness. It is a marvel of internet technology that such an individual is able to express herself in this way to such a large audience;