The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

30. Live Video

30 LiveVideo Laura U. Marks YOU ARE IN a dim room in a Toronto gallery, lying on a sprawling beanbag chair that must be two meters long, gazing up at a screen. A strange little character, emitting wordless cries, stumbles across a sort of brightly colored postapocalyptic landscape. It must be a science fiction movie! But wait: every time the forms on screen shift, the music hums and twitters in sympathy: it’s a melodrama! The answer to what kind of movie you are watching lies in a studio in Brooklyn, where a collection of food wrappers, twine, labels, and styrofoam peanuts is blowing around on a huge round table. With no human present, computer-driven cameras switch among views of the trash, and simple software analyzes its movement to generate sounds that seem to correspond to the images. The same software, programmed by the invisible artists of this piece, edits in shot–reverse shot rhythms that seem to come straight out of a daytime soap opera. A live Internet feed streams the images and sounds to where you are lounging in Toronto, and it is you who are projecting characters, motivations, and genre styles on these innocent bits of refuse. The piece, called the Appearance Machine, is the work of longtime collaborators Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzweig, a.k.a. Screen. It is one of the exciting manifestations of a recent development in low-tech digital media, in which artists take advantage of commercial platforms, pro-sumer mixing boards, and developments in digital cinema to mix video live. Live video performances draw variously on DJ- and VJ-style mixing, free jazz, vaudeville, and avant-garde performance art. Production has skyrocketed in recent months, as digital mixing equipment becomes more affordable and artist-programmers develop software. Among the numerous fascinating experiments in this 305 burgeoning medium, the five artist teams I will look at in this essay are Screen (Le Maitre and Rosenzweig); Stackable Thumb (Naval Cassidy and Valued Cu$tomer); the RK Corral (Kristin Lemberg, Rajendra Serber, Bulk Foodveyor, Cheryl Leonard, and Scott “Scooter” Wilson ); Jennifer and Kevin McCoy (no alias); and Animal Charm (Rich Bott and Jim Fetterley). Their low-end extravaganzas make use of sampling, improvisation, homemade platforms, trash props, and the artists’ own bodies to produce unique audiovisual “concerts.” Image feeds are synthesized live and projected, or translated in real time into other sorts of information that affect the multisensory spectacle. Live video is an interesting intervention in the virtual or simulacral quality of digital cinema, for it can only exist live; live-to-tape video documents are just that. The “content” of these works is obsolescence and cultural detritus: they recycle cast-off images from commercial culture, as well as real trash. 306 LAURA U. MARKS The Appearance Machine is streamed to the gallery where viewers recline on a huge beanbag pad and watch the live audio/video transmission projection (Appearance Machine, 2000). Live video is an offshoot of the general resurgence of performance video. If you take a look at the output of M.F.A. programs in recent years, you’ll see many works that look like they could have been produced in 1972, except for that giveaway digital shimmer: single-shot sight gags for camera; intimate, improvised performances; feedback experiments that take advantage of machine randomness. Paradoxically, now that digital cameras, editing, and effects are giving almost unlimited control to artists, it seems that many are choosing to give up their control and allow the live event, or the whims of the medium (whims that must be assiduously programmed back in to control-freak editing software), to determine the look and feel of their final project. While commercial and high-end art applications use digital technology to increase the filmmaker’s control of the spectacle, live video uses computers to emphasize the role of chance. This is a hands-off aesthetic. FIRST-WAVE LIVE VIDEO Many live video artists consciously seek their roots in the analog experiments of the knob-twiddling early 1970s. Benton Bainbridge (Valued Cu$tomer) of Stackable Thumb writes, When I and my cohorts leaped into the live video thing as the ’90s kicked off, we had the same conviction that cinema was a performable medium, but little knowledge of our predecessors. In the Postmodern ’80s, the abstract qualities of the medium, a fundamental issue to wrestle with when trying to “play” video in concert with...