Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014

Phil Solomon’s “EMPIRE” (2008/2012), an installation made in the videogame space of Grand Theft Auto, raises issues of memory and materiality as they pertain to the medium specificities of film and digital media. As a remake of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), the work addresses concerns pertinent to structural film of the 1960s and 1970s, including, on the one hand, the material fragility of film as a physical medium, and, on the other, the immaterial endurance of an idea of cinema. “EMPIRE” expresses structural film’s contradictory approaches to materiality in digital terms by using a videogame object that is temporally ‘indefinite’, as indicated in the work’s accompanying wall text. Additionally, as part of the series In Memoriam (Mark LaPore), “EMPIRE” is a work of mourning. As such, its indefinite running time offers a meditation on the temporality of memorials and the capacity of film, photography and digital media to realize the process of memorialization.

The migration of cinematic forms and content from the movie theatre to the gallery is often analysed as a passage between two institutions and modes of experience, while the influence of other media and practices tends to be neglected. This article discusses three constellations in which the relation between cinema and the museum is complicated by other types of experience: Stan VanDerBeek’s immersive ‘movie-drome’, Jean Baudrillard’s polemic analysis of the Centre Pompidou as a paradigmatic scene of distraction and commodification and Dominique Païni’s evocation of the Benjaminian flâneur as the prototypical model of the ambulating museum visitor. In highlighting these three facets, the article proposes to recognize distraction and attention as key terms for conceptualizing the encounters between cinema and the exhibition space.

The technique of time-lapse, which has been applied to all manner of subjects from the cellular to the celestial, has an ambiguous relationship with the human body. Whereas slow motion typically accentuates the force and aesthetics of physical movement, time-lapse tends to decorporealize human figures, projecting bodies forward through time while turning them into phantasmal projections in space. This article examines a number of experimental films that explore the body’s precarious state within time-lapse. Here, the body is figured variously as a medium through which environmental forces are made visible, as a liminal figure that leaves traces of its presence in the landscape or as a kind of ghost suspended outside of its native temporality. These works destabilize the body both as the subject and as the object of representation, making ambiguous its place in relation to different temporal scales.