This year I have been doing a lot of listening to the now all-inclusive field of “digital media art.” I regularly read the blog HTMLGIANT for insight into how fiction and poetry writers are adapting to the changes digital culture brings to literary form. In a recent conversation between Blake Butler and Matthew Simmons about David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Blake had this to say:
“… while I enjoyed Shields’s book, and could see it bringing benefits to those who haven’t thought so much about escaping the undoubtedly dead scene of traditional narrative lit, I’d much rather have seen the book act less as a manual or a ‘manifesto’ and more as the kind of amorphous, transfixing objects that he calls for. This is more a syllabus, less an art….All that said, a syllabus can be a great thing. I wish there’d been more feelers that escaped the book, transcended it, rather than a kind of diatribe. ” -Blake Butler
I was also (sadly) underwhelmed by Reality Manifesto. It traces only part of the history of constructing art from contingent reality. Shields hardly mentions the de-mythologizing influences of cinema and networked culture on narrative form. Hasn’t blogging and video blogging done it’s share of breaking down our sense of reality into bite-sized, multimodal fragments? What really surprised me was Shields’ dismissal of fiction-making as a still vital and powerful art. Just ask BP about the power of fiction. It is not the fabrications of fiction vs. contingent reality that is the issue. It is how artists arrive at the structures of their creations that is changing.
In his Poetics of Cinema 2, in a chapter called Structure and Construction, Raul Ruiz writes:
“Structure relates to the creation of the work, taken as a singular entity; while construction concerns the film in relation to the many circumstances that interact with it, throughout its making; during the many processes that will allow it to surface. That is, its relation with that which is near and far.” -Raul Ruiz
It is this “near and far”, the othernesss that intrudes on “the plan,” that is so hard to pin down in an artist’s statement or teach in the classroom, much less welcome inside the creative process. So much of our training in making things is industrial: pre-production, production, post-production; outline, draft, final draft. And yet, our lives have become more and more influenced by Black Swans.
I get great pleasure in contemplating the structures of art – videos, paintings, novels, poems, movies. So when I embark on my own art project, if structure isn’t clear, I start doubting my choices and the project stumbles. But then sometimes, something happens. I let go of my own plans and start listening for the works’s own desired shape. I start constructing. Good structure is grown inside the contingent circumstances of the work’s construction. It is a dynamic of mind, body and materials.
If we give up worrying about structure and all that that it implies – mediums, genres, markets, audiences – and instead look to practices of construction, we might find that digital art wants to be something very different than most models of (popular and high) art in the industrial age.
For example, we know digital art wants speed. It wants to be free or cheap. It wants to be social so that it gets attention. It wants novelty so that it acts like an eddy in the rush of information. It may even want to alter our senses with “mutant percepts and affects” (Guattari), or at least do something that a steady diet of information bits cannot do.
If we abandon knowable forms in favor of hybrid monsters, where do we look for models? Avant-garde and modernist practices, barthesian fragmentation and delluezian rhizomes – where to start? The history is there and will be (re)taught in schools and universities as economies (once again) shed 19th century models of mind and reality. But let’s not mistake storytelling for structure as we create new digital forms.
I’ll leave you with the constructions of Michael Robinson. He has taken remix art to a different level by building improbable and beautiful enigmas of sound, text and image. His cinema is made of the shells of past structures and re-purposed into hybrid monsters. But instead of being diatribes against the mythic past, they weave stories from an inhuman future. Dark and good. Enjoy.
What if cinema art’s economic model shifted from its traditional show business roots to something resembling the art market and in the process helped reconstruct the economics of art–making in the digital age. That’s right, moving an art form that has always been democratic toward something elitist. Let’s face it, the great film artists—Dreyer, Bresson, Antonioni, Cassavettes, etc., were stubborn and elitist directors who at one time were the talk of the town not because they were speaking to everyone, but precisely because they were uncompromising and difficult. Show business cinema will continue to give us those big collective experiences that we all love, but without the more exploratory/experimental cinema arts, the language will become stale. Late Hitchcock needs the French New Wave.
What would a cinema art market look like? I guess Matthew Barney is one model, but an unfortunate one. Making the Cremaster cycle limited edition DVDs does not put those images into collective circulation (I’ve been able to see only 2). It would be like owners putting Picasso’s first cubist paintings into a vault. Patrons and collectors should want their artists popular, exposed and of collective value.
Another model is Mark Amerika’s recent cell phone project, Immobilite: a limited edition feature film shown at museums, a website with remixed video segments, an iphone app, a pdf publication, a blog, probably some wall art and performances thrown in. I haven’t seen the 70 min. projected “film”, but what I love about the project is that it is trying to create a model for a new type of art cinema (and a new type of writing) by offering the process of its making and distribution as part of the work. The project is kind of manifesto. You can’t get more democratic than a cell phone. But again, it would be a shame if the limited edition feature were not available for viewing outside major cities.
How to sell a cinema project to collectors and still make it available to everyone? We have to get away from thinking of a cinema work as a 70-100 minute feature. More than anything the work should open up possibilities of seeing in a multi-dimensional way. This could mean something transmedia—a DVD, a book, a database, an installation, a website, wall art, social networking. This does not mean cinema artists should (necessarily) renounce narrative. It does mean looking at narrative as an element in the web of culture and not the dominating force for making meaning. Eija-Liisa Ahtila (with the help of Finland state funding) makes affecting stories for multi-screen installations and linear versions of the same stories for the festival circuit.
What about funding cinema art? What does it cost a painter to get a studio, paints, canvas, model? These costs are figured into the price of the final work. What does it cost a small theater company to put on a show? Public funding and patronage could help digital artists, but costs for shooting are near zero. Actors must be paid however, and though much depends on the nature of the project, their fees should also be included into the price of the final work. How much would a collector pay up front for a limited edition David Lynch project? How much would a collector pay up front for a limited edition newcomer’s project? I don’t know. But wouldn’t it be a bonus for “culture” if the artists were simply paid for the work and then let it go? No need for talk show circuits, promotional events, marketing campaigns. Just the art itself circulating the networks.
By embracing an art market (not the current one necessarily), there might be innovative ways to support novel cinema forms. Galleries and museums could be extraordinary houses for the moving image. Public funding could help everyone make, teach and share cinema art. Authors and musicians could partner with cinema artists to make hybrid works not just adaptations of novels or music video commercials. By owning limited editions of the work, collectors (the 1000 fans?) could choose screenings online and off to publicize their collections. And most importantly artists could make a viable living by making work, sharing their ideas with the public and doing it in a context that celebrates experimental forms. We need novel art to get us through these enormous cultural changes, and I would argue we need novel cinema art most of all.
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