The content of my dossier is primarily film based work that deals with jolting a viewer out of a normal experience of cinema/the screen. The work or experience that I love the most and would love to create is a feeling of split reality or time that the work of Miller/Cardiff, Huyghe, Fusinato, Smith and Marclay creates. In my own work, I love investigating time and experience. I have now been reflecting more on the audiences experience of time and how that can be manipulated.
My main areas of research have been artists that deal with film time’s divergence from real-time and cinematic tropes/language and expectation. I have been developing my idea of looping and opening up time within a video work and the research I have been doing has allowed me to expand on these ideas.
The theories of Smithson seem to be intertwined into a lot of artist’s thinking, namely Hughye who has developed them further.
Smithson's notions of time as subjective, and in particular his views of cinematic time, entropic suspension of time, experience and duration. Ideas of the loop and time constructs in cinema “Repetition creates order,” and, “temporal continuity conceals the discrete structure of illusion,” while also the immersion of memory and the viewing/viewer experience, “we remember cinema as being in it, not of watching a screen”, are observations that are helping to rethink and develop my ideas of viewer experience in relation to cinema.
Pierre Huyghe’s theories seem to be in a similar vein to Smithson. His early experiments, firstly with the opening up of time and creating an “open present” (in works such as his billboard series in 1994 and Trajet 1992) to his development of non-linearity in cinematic time and delving into “a time beyond screen-time” (ie. The Third Memory 1999-2000, L’Ellipse 1998) has influenced me to rethink time as fixed/objective and has opened up the possibilities of time/duration/experience as subjective and malleable.
I am drawn to work that uses its medium to comment on itself, i.e. in the work of Hito Steyerl, using film and special effects to draw attention to cinematic language and special effects/tricks. Also the work of Viola, and Crooks, using simple or highly technical effects in order to highlight the film itself as a medium in the experience of the viewer.
I am interested in the idea of the camera mimicking the human experience and I am looking at ways that the audience can re-mimic that artificial human experience back. Walden's idea of ‘reflexive mimesis in contemporary visual culture’ has made me rethink an audience position as being passive, and ways of replicating the human experience in a film that will provide a jolt if tampered with. Her ideas of ‘the loop’ and what it produces: a pattern of endless repetition that traps us in time and produces an experience called ‘reflexive mimesis’, intrigues me as I love the idea of being trapped in time through repetition.
My main area of interest is how cinematic language is naturalised and becomes ingrained in our awareness, and how that translates to other technology i.e. iPhones etc. My further development of research will be into ways to subvert the human/camera experience. Primarily looking at filmmakers and theorists, and artists who use these theories and other artists using new media and technology.