Viva Paci

Images from the Future: Lost and Found in the Images du Futur collection

Cinematographic Traces

Traces of the cinematograph

How did the cinema fare (this institution that has shown us what the future could be like a thousand times over) in an exhibition like Images du Futur? Surprisingly, one finds no traces of the cinema — in its institutional form, that is — among these images of the future, and not even of the madcap cinema of the amusement parks. (On the other side of technological/visionary art, one has the exhibition Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imagery after Film, which, through an exhibit selection comprising innumerable examples, recently made the claim (in 2002-2003) that large-scale cinema will exist in the future, but with a major slimming down of basic film and screening room equipment. If the cinema was not presented as such in Images du Futur, there was nonetheless an International Computer Animation Competition attached to the exhibition (see also "Sunless Images: 3D Animation" and "Lines and Paintbrushes: 2D"). But these digital animations, even if they were shown in a film screening room (outside the exhibition space), featured mainly advertisements, television credit sequences and 3D logos for a wide variety of companies. Viewers who attended the International Computer Animation Competition, and who were not necessarily the same as those attending Images du Futur, were not so much "going to the movies" as taking in a demonstration of contemporary qualities and possibilities that pointed to the future of the digital image.

If we press ahead somewhat with observation and drop the focus on institutional forms, we do find the cinema present in a large number of the installations presented at Images du Futur, but broken down into some of its basic components. Everything there seemed to concur that the cinema could move toward images of the future only by pursuing a line of development different from that of the institution — only by accentuating, for example, its deepest roots, ones that, in the case of some devices, extended all the way back to the memory of the pre-cinema. Many of the devices in Images du Futur played with the genetic concepts of the cinema, like optical illusions; they ranged from retinal afterimages to the phi effect, and from the deconstruction and reconstruction of motion. Take, for example, Taizo Matsumura’s Meta-Ball, presented at Images du Futur in 1994. This piece made use of a retinal afterimage to make viewers perceive coloured circles: a colour laser beam directed at the centre of a pivoting round metal structure was refracted onto a rotating surface, in the process generating a continuous shape in the eye of the viewer. In 1992, the same creator made Motion in Motion, using a video camera attached to a pivoting axis to film a series of identical objects (tilted white cubes) one after the other. The video camera was connected to a monitor on which the viewer could observe what appeared to be a continuous, fluid motion. Like the original cinematograph, this device managed to both capture and transmit the image, creating movement with static images and objects. The filmable, the filmed and the act of filming (along with its mechanism) all drew the attention of the public.

With Putti, presented at Images du Futur in 1993, Gregory Barsamian, a beneficiary of the zootrope and an explorer of the phi effect, made real 3D animations using plaster figures of angels and helicopters. The animation in this piece, and the visual continuity it created for the viewer, were due to the phi effect. A sequence of sculptures (13 per second) spun above viewers’ heads in a dimly lit environment pierced by a stroboscopic light designed to fill the gaps between one image and the next. This created an impression of a continuous motion that transformed the tiny angels into helicopters. In this instance sculpture, like the cinema, became a temporal art form that takes shape in and through rythm.

As another example, Emmanuel Carlier’s video installation Temps morts, presented at Images du Futur in 1996, made use of four screens arranged in a circle to show an image filmed with 100 cameras located all around a body in motion. Like the chronophotographic rifle that Etienne Jules Marey made in the late 19th century, this device broke down motion as the photograph was taken. Unlike the photographic gun, however, Carlier’s device does not break down the moving image into successive instants, but deconstructs it in space. Cameras (arranged around an axis serving as a reference point) were adjusted to slightly different viewing angles with extremely short time intervals, indeed mere fractions of a second, between each shutter release. Together, the cameras reconstructed a single final image at the time of printing. Viewers could therefore admire the photographed object displayed on a 2D surface (a viewing screen) but incorporated into a 3D space. And this gave them the impression that they could move all around the photographed body (see also "Flashforward").