10 x 12 x 8 feet

multimedia sculpture

automated projection system, cyanotype, xerox,

velum, canvas, velvet, laminate, wood and mdf sub-form

2007-2008

Cinema Machine: Heirloom extracts antiquated forms, architectural features and technology from image making devices and image distribution systems, synthesizing them into an automated sculptural object. The result redefines their function and our relationship to them.

Drawing from both photographic and cinematic sources, the Cinema Machine fuses these modes of imaging, on the basis of their mutual influence on our contemporary perceptions of history, via the legacy of still and moving images. The obsolescence of these forms suggest an era that produced and distributed a multitude of images, and image-making traditions. That production now provides a contemporary viewership with a familiar canon of images—a photo-cinematic history.

The Cinema Machine reformulates the experience of moving images, in a manner specifically oriented to the clearly defined operation of the cinema. This work takes a theater-based paradigm and rearticulates it into an automated sculptural object. The object replicates specific aspects of the cinematic event, and upends others.

The Cinema Machine exhibits a loosely constructed narrative that is born out of an interplay between two sets of photographic images. One set presents images appropriated from American Western films made during the 1920's-1950's, and the second set are self-authored aerial photographs of the local area. This "filmic" content, defined by a checkerboard grid of images, suggests a weaving—a legacy object—an heirloom. The composite portrays a likeness of a topographical map, which exhibits an ahistorical vision of the ephemeral boundary that exists between altered and unaltered landscape.

The images presented portray a shift in the perception of our physical environment, through distinct pictorial perspectives. The cinematic images portray a frontal perspective that is normative to cinematic pictorialism, in contrast to the aerial photography that utilizes bird's eye perspective, a pictorial mode that is unique to our current visual consciousness. The images convey a contrast defined by the incidental documentarianism contained in the tradition of narrative cinema, in relation to the intentional documentarinism of aerial photography, cartography and satellite imaging.

The work employs industrial automation technologies to actuate the cinematic event within the sculptural object. There are multiple projection devices housed within the ticket booth that operate on a conglomerate of timing sequences. The use of automation in the piece also serves to question the degree to which the cinematic event is defined by human exchange, in spite of the machine-based optical experience of the cinema. Here, electro-mechanical engineering replaces the human element in the cinematic experience, thus negating the expectation for human immediacy. It additionally disrupts the economic exchange that is the basis for commercial cinema.

The work is designed to portray itself as an inanimate object that is activated during the course of the viewers experience, consequently transforming the art object into a revised form of spectacle.

Installation Video: