MASTER
September 14 - December 1, 2024
JACQUES DERRIDA, Specters of Marx
In the age of the influencer and the influenced ; of multiple truths, platforms and laws; of shifting and contested boundaries, bodies and borders, the practice of (cinematic) appropriation persists. Cultural theorist Jacque Derrida once called the persistence of elements that evoke the past, an hauntology...a play on the word ontology or the study of existence... questioning if there is a fundamental substance, and whether or not things are real. (Cinematic) appropriation continues to persist, like all useful and valuable materials and strategies, as something artists can ream and roil; deform and detach... and mine for rich, intrinsic interpretations. These new works reflect the world we live in, or they voice inner worlds of imagination and perception. As a supplement, cinema leaves behind the extraordinary trace, ready to be scraped, remixed and reactivated in increasingly new ways as new technologies and new situations emerge.
The cinematic moments in this exhibition are borrowed from a master manipulator. Six artists from five countries use appropriated cinema from one celebrated Director; a material that is ripe with compulsion, dislocation and flawed humanity; a material identifiable for its memorable sound, colour, places, personalities and psychologies. Eight extraordinary installations offer imaginative reflections on how AI metabolizes & dreams, a robotic exploration of human potential, AI that surveils human emotions, a rumination on filmic marginalia, a series of imaginary journeys retraced, a hypnotic spectacle, a lock that connects space and time, and a monologue on television as a metaphor for human mortality.
‘The Director’ is a character at once fictitious and real; a surveilling presence confined to a small screen. The exhibition design references a cinematic totality confined (and perhaps liberated?) by its domestic setting. Each new soundscape moves us through an iterative process of memory, surreal repetition, uncanny voiceover, and base heartbeat.
MASTER marks a decade for New Media Gallery. Six artists from around the world appropriate the films of one celebrated director to create startlingly new interpretations. The works span a quarter century (2000 - 2024) with two early works reconstructed or remastered. Over the past decade New Media Gallery has presented the work of more than 200 international artists in 35 group exhibitions, representing over half a century of extraordinary artistic accomplishment in new media.
J Tobias Anderson (Sweden)
Sliced Classics, 2003 - 2024
8 Channel Sychronised Video and Sound (inaugural showing)
Colour/B&W, Stereo, Aspect Ratio 4:3
Duration 00:45 min +-
What resides at the edges or the margins of film are those areas rarely seen in a domestic setting on a TV. In domestic settings, and with ongoing changes to format,
films were and still are always cropped unmercifully, removing sections of the filmed content in order to give us a ‘full-screen’ experience. Sliced Classics moves the focus of the viewer from the centre to the peripheral areas of the image. Eight classic Hollywood movies from a Master Director, make up this new work. Each is presented on separate monitor, but only the edges or margins of the movies are used, edges one usually never sees, or at least never thinks about when viewing the original movie.
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Biography
J Tobias Anderson is a Swedish artist and filmmaker working with found footage, frequently in conjunction with animation. His deeply questioning work frequently present ontological questions related to human existence and human nature - with considerations of emptiness, and absence. His work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, stockholm, IVAM, Institut Valencia d”Art Modern, Spain among others. He has won numerous awards for his films. He has been exhibiting worldwide since 1998 in group and solo exhibitions, Bienniales and Film Festivals such as The Swedish Film
Institute, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, Transmediale, Germany, Centre Pompiou, Paris.
Credits
Scott Billings (Canada)
Übermensch (2018)
HD 12 Robotic Manipulators, 3D Print Single channel Video + Sound Installation
Übermensch (2018) consists of a miniature 3D printed film set held, turned and surveilled by industrial robot arms (manipulators) and film cameras. The rehearsal consists of a scene from Hitchcock’s, Rope (1948), a film based on the true story of Leopold and Loeb who killed a 14-year-old boy just for the thrill of it. Hitchcock described the single-duration film as a cinematographical stunt driven by the technical pursuit of the never-ending long take. Übermensch revisits ethical and moral debates of Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch in the age of artificial intelligence and post humanism.
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Biography
Scott Billings is a visual artist and designer based in Vancouver. His art practice centres on issues of animality, mobility, and cinematic spectatorship. Billings’s sculptures and video installations examine the ways in which the apparatus itself reveals the mechanisms of causality and its own dormant animality.
Billings holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and a BASc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Waterloo. His art practice looks at the mimetic relationship between the apparatus of cinema and the language of movement it articulates. Centering on issues of animality, roboethics, and spectatorship, his sculptures and video installations mix the spatial spectacle of long takes with the materiality of kineticism. Scott Billings also works as a mechanical engineer and industrial designer in Vancouver, focusing on wearable exoskeletons and custom camera rigs. He has participated in multiple residencies, has been awarded Public Art Projects and maintains a teaching practice. His work has been presented in Canada, USA, Europe and China ; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, Audain Gallery, Vancouver, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver, Burrard Arts Foundation to name a few.
Credits
Gregory Chatonsky (Canada/France)
Prediction, 2015
AI Computer, 77inch monitor
Software attempts to detect the emotions of characters in Vertigo (1958). On the screen a series of emotions and evaluating numbers appears, changing for each edit. The evaluation is like an emotional subtitle of the movie, separating the machine and the human projections. “It is a question of transforming the temporality of the cinematograph into a navigable space. Sign of the times: the passage from time to space, the passage from the flow of cinema to the Internet network map. Let us imagine a film in which we could move. Let’s imagine a film that would be a mental
space.” (Gregory Chatonsky)
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Vertigo@home (2015)
In the 1958 film Vertigo, a man in a car follows and surveils a woman who is looking for a non-existent past. Using Google Street view, 2015, the artist retraces the on-location filming of the movie, reproducing with precision the filmed movements of the characters as they navigate the streets of San Francisco and at the same time capturing a google past view. As the title indicates,Vertigo@home was created by Chatonsky at home, a feat made possible by the use of Google Street View. A function of Google Maps, Streetview offers navigators a car’s—eye view of the roads they plan to travel, offering a fairly clear picture of structures, landmarks, and, as privacy advocates have lamented, people in compromising situations. Chatonsky matches his route to Scottie’s as closely as possible, “editing” as Hitchcock did, in order to sync the soundtrack with the action (i.e., pace of travel).
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The Kiss 3 : The Recursive Cinema, (2022)
Using the famous kissing scene in Vertigo the artist injects the entire synopsis of the film through an AI (see this link for that textual synopsis). The short kissing scene metabolizes the whole film which is automatically reinterpreted from a latent space of possibilities. One in a series of experimental works using AI to analyze Vertigo. “It is a question of transforming the temporality of the cinematograph into a navigable space. Sign of the times: the passage from time to space, the passage from the flow of cinema to the Internet network map. Let us imagine a film in which we could move. Let’s imagine a film that would be a mental space.” (Gregory Chatonsky)
Image (The Kiss 3)
Biography
Grégory Chatonsky is a French-Canadian artist who explores a troubled zone between the human being and technology, a boundary that modifies the definition and scope of finitude to the point where it is no longer existential. .
His work is an enigmatic exploration of anthropotechnology. The artist uses digital and traditional media to create a body of work that is continually re-imagined for each exhibition. Exploring themes such as learning, memory, extinction and resurrection, these works evoke a fiction without narrative. Each work represents a new iteration that occupies a specific position within a modular material structure that functions as a latent space.
He founded Incident.net, a Netart platform, in 1994. In the 2000s, he explored digital materiality as ruins and flux. From 2009, he experimented with AI, organizing a seminar at ENS Ulm on artificial imagination. He has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume, MOCA Taipei, Museum of Moving Image, Hubei Wuhan Museum and many other venues. His works can be found in private and public collections, including those of the CNAP, FAC, BNF, Hubei Museum and Musée Granet. He has taught at Le Fresnoy, UQAM and Artec.
Lee Henderson (Canada)
De Mortuis (2011)
De Mortuis (2011) is a video, presented on an historic television set. Pulling fragments of footage from the television program 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents’, in which Hitchcock addressed viewers before and after each episode, the artist re-edits the clips so that Hitchcock now delivers a speech on the metaphysics of the electronic image and on the television as a metaphor for human mortality.
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Biography
Lee Henderson is a contemporary artist whose practice includes video, photography, installation, sculpture, performance, and text. His work moves in constant contemplation of death, in senses grand and minute, somewhere between the persistence of collective histories and the brevity of individual lives.
Henderson studied art in Canada and Germany. He holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Regina. He teaches art and media at Canadian Universities. Recent projects and commissions have been presented at Kunstraum Tapir, Berlin,YYZ, Toronto, The Rooms, St. John’s, Nuit Blanche Edmonton, Latitude53, Edmonton. Henderson is the recipient of the CONTACT Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso Prize. Recent exhibition venues include The Phillips Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Magenta Festival Boston, The Zero Film Festival (USA); The Dunlop Art Gallery, Mendel Art Gallery, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, and Zalucky Contemporary (Canada); Samaband Islenskra Myndlistarmanna, Reykjavik (Iceland). His work can be found in private and public collections including the Mendel Art Gallery/Remai Modern, the University of Regina President’s Collection, and The Center for Fine Art Photography USA.
Credits
Les LeVeque (USA)
4 Vertigo, 2000 (AI Remake 2024)
Hitchcock’s 128-minute feature film ‘Vertigo’ has been processed anew by capturing one frame for every two seconds of the original movie. The condensed film was duplicated four times, shifting the horizontal or vertical orientation of the frame with each duplication so that the first image is right side up, the next is sideways, then upside down, then sideways, and finally right side up again. This is only evident when the video is examined frame by frame: played at normal speed the result is a stuttering kaleidoscopic engine that gives the viewer a nauseating yet thrilling sensation of physical and psychic weightlessness. In LeVeque’s treatment the layered plot line and psychological depths of the Hitchcock original are overtaken by the patterns and rhythms of the new aesthetic centrifuge.
LeVeque states: ‘Building on the notion of obsessive looking, I wanted to transform the original movie into a spinning mandala to generate a sensuous viewing where the dramatic narrative becomes unstable and elusive, a viewing experience where the hypnosis of cinematic spectacle is articulated to such a physical degree that it engenders a consciousness of watching.’
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Biography
Les LeVeque is an artist based in New York who works with digital and analog electronic technology. Their work includes single and multi-channel videos, video/computer-based/ film installations and live video synthesizer performances. LeVeque's work often utilizes algorithmic structures, statistically distributed elements, experimentation with the boundaries of interfaces, the use and misuse of current and obsolete technologies and may provide new views of existing narratives. They have produced a number of videos and video installations exploring the cultural implications of technological change. They often use Hollywood classics as a starting point, transforming them into sensuous, hallucinatory works which aim to unveil the repressed representations that loiter inside so many ‘wholesome’ American classics.
Leveque holds an MFA from the College of Visual and Performing Arts, Syracuse University, New York. Since 1991, they have won multiple awards internationally, first exhibiting in 1990 and since then have been featured in group and solo exhibitions and screenings worldwide including : UCLA Hammer Museum, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Paco des Arts Sao Paolo Brazil, Museo Nacional Center de Arte, Reina Sofia Madrid, Centre Pompidou, Paris, ZKM Karlsruhe, Musee de Contemporani Barcelona,New York Video Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the 2000 Whitney Biennial among many others.
Les LeVeque Website
Credits
Daniele Puppi (Italia)
Psychedelic Lock, 2016
Two connected LED monitors, positioned horizontally, link a space defined by two angular walls. An image is passed back and forth, from one monitor to the other accompanied by a forceful rhythmic sound that is both sustained and hypnotic. In the passage from one dimension to the other, the image projected acquires a double physicality, thus defining the very space between the two dimensions — the architectural (physical) and the extreme limitations of movement. In the juncture between the two monitors, passing from one temporal dimension to another, a new image, a new space for perception is created establishing a relationship between two distant realities. It is a sort of “door” which offers similar stories of two diverse periods in time to coexist.
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Biography
Daniele Puppi is a visual artist and designer who works to unhinge the idea of space that is still perceived and revolves around Euclidean parameters. With an emphasis on video installation, he has manifested a new attitude towards this medium, emphasizing and radically subverting the use of sound and visual-architectonic reconfigurations that are constantly reinvented.
Puppi conceives of his work as authentic “works in regress”. He experiences the environment, assesses its limits and its potential. The technologies used – video projectors, synchronizers, amplifiers, sub woofers, speakers and microphones – serve to activate and amplify our powers of perception, especially visual and auditory. An integral part of the work is that the viewer is called upon to enter a new and de- familiarized spatial and sensory dimension. Puppi’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions around the world ; at MAXXI, GNAM museum, and Quadriennale in Rome, HangarBicocca and Triennale in Milan, MART in Rovereto, GAMEC in Bergamo, the Melbourne International Arts Festival and MAMBA in Buenos Aires among many others. He lives and works between Rome and London. He lectures and gives workshops worldwide.
Daniele Puppi website