My research presentation at the University of Regina New Media Studio Laboratory lab open house showcase on March 20, 2015: "The end of magic, or how technology gave us everyday spectacles"
Ever
since I was a kid, I loved making movies. I always understood that the medium
was all about engineering and science, but when I showed work to people, it
felt like magic. Two days ago, I asked my son to define magic and he told me “Magic
is effect without cause” (WOBS, 2015). Let’s come back to that in a minute.
New
media’s moving images owe everything to old media which, in turn, is indebted
to its predecessors. When film was in its infancy 120 years ago, a stage
magician Georges Melies saw its potential; not as cinema but as magic. Armed
with publications on photographic trickery (superimpositions, split screens,
masking) and introducing his own discoveries about editing and the interruption
of a shot, he went on to create what are considered the seminal movie special
effects. Was he trying to invent the cinema spectacle that is so ubiquitous
today? Let us first consider what he was really working with.
From
the praxiniscope (1877) to film (1893) to television (1925) to digital video
(1986), to the animated GIF (1989) and all other variants of digital moving
images, one thing has stayed the same; a rapidly changing display of images
evoke an illusion in the mind we refer to as persistence of vision. Looking
back at the many historical devices that create this condition, it becomes
clear that it is not the camera that creates this, but the viewing apparatus.
1960s
Canadian painter and filmmaker Keewatin Dewdney once said: "The projector,
not the camera, is the filmmaker's true medium... The very use of the camera as
a filmmaking tool has imposed the assumption of continuity on film"
Returning
to Melies, was he all about the purity of cinema? Or about the purity of magic?
No. Cinema didn’t exist yet, at least not the way we see it today, and in terms
of magic, he was dirtying the waters rather than expanding the field. There is
no magic. To paraphrase my son, there is nothing without cause. The illusion of magic created with effects, by
the intervening hand of the “magician”.
Melies recognized that the performance didn't matter, nor did the art,
or the craft or, for that matter, the truth. All that mattered was what
the audience would see. The nature of the motion picture medium would ensure
that this would always be an illusion.
No
matter if the images being shown are captured from reality through a camera
lens or were created using drawing or virtual tools, the output and the nature
of the illusion remains the same. We were spellbound.
Tom Gunning
wrote “if the production of motion rendered the everyday marvelous,
nonetheless, as with all technological novelties, familiarity dulls the edge of
wonder” The obsessive overuse of
spectacular illusion has led to a boredom of the marvel. As media not only
relies on illusion, but IS illusion, what happens when it is all taken for
granted?
In
his book “Trickster Makes This World”, Lewis Hyde quotes Nietzsche saying
"Truth are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are
illusions" (p.77) This would suggest that we no longer see a difference
between media and truth. Hyde goes on to
argue that a trickster "can debunk an illusion”. In a way, the trickster
can help us to believe and disbelieve simultaneously.
Following
Hydes’s model for the mythologized tricksters as agents of change, as
individuals willing to see the world differently, I challenge myself and my
students to break the rules, to play the trickster and to do it “wrong”. I try to teach them to not be concerned about
tradition or structure or expectation except in regards to understanding it and
knowing how to disrupt it. At the root of it all, the moving image has not
changed in well over a century. All media involving the moving images is just a
series of single images which can be altered in any way we can dream. What
happens in the time between when one image disappears and the next reappears?
That is where we come in and change the rules. Remember, you don’t watch a
magic show because you believe in magic, you watch it so that you can enjoy
being tricked. It is, as Melies
observed, all an illusion.
I
then presented some very short works by MFA graduate students I worked with
this term.
An
An
Xin
Shen
Rania
Al Harthi
Zaheer
Shahid
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Bibliography
Keewatin Dewdney quoted by Mike Hoolboom. "Cinema of Death", program notes, Toronto,
date unknown.
Gunning,
Tom, The Transforming Image” 2013 Pervasive Animation, page 66 , 2013
Hyde, Lewis.
Trickster Makes This World,
