Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman by Dara Birnbaum

"Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the 'real' woman's symbolic transformation into super-hero. Entrapped in her magical metamorphosis by Birnbaum's stuttering edits, Wonder Woman spins dizzily like a music-box doll. Through radical manipulation of this female Pop icon, she subverts its meaning within the television text. Arresting the flow of images through fragmentation and repetition, Birnbaum condenses the comic-book narrative — Wonder Woman deflects bullets off her bracelets, 'cuts' her throat in a hall of mirrors — distilling its essence to allow the subtext to emerge. In a further textual deconstruction, she spells out the words to the song Wonder Woman in Discoland on the screen. The lyrics' double entendres ('Get us out from under... Wonder Woman') reveal the sexual source of the superwoman's supposed empowerment: 'Shake thy Wonder Maker.' Writing about the 'stutter-step progression of 'extended moments' of transformation from Wonder Woman,' Birnbaum states, 'The abbreviated narrative — running, spinning, saving a man — allows the underlying theme to surface: psychological transformation versus television product. Real becomes Wonder in order to 'do good' (be moral) in an (a) or (im)moral society.'"

(Electronic Arts Intermix)

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Daniel Crooks: digital divisionism and image transposition

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The artistic image: 'between the sayable and the visible'

"The sworn enemy of this logic of combination or juxtaposition are the border police of genre classification (typical of art history and its curatorial leanings which seem to contaminate film theory too) who struggle with any notion of redistribution of the sensible. It is in The Future of The Image that Jacques Rancière defines the artistic image as a set of operations or relations 'between the sayable and the visible' and calls this the regime of the 'distribution of the sensible', a status quo which can be altered, through a redistribution, which creates new ways of seeing (Rancière, 2007: 6). In the work of Marker and Godard, such a redistribution of the sensible has been generally understood, categorised as–and duly named–'film–essays', ever since André Bazin coined the phrase, referring specifically to Marker's work as a political and historical type of writing mediated by poetry (Bazin, 1985: 179–181). Fine. But what does the catch–phrase cover? What practice does it immunise? Is there a risk of seriously limiting the scope and aesthetic dimension of such films by segregating them?

Phillip Lopate considers the film–essay a 'cinematic genre that barely exists' in Can Movies Think? In Search of The Centaur: The Essay–Film (Lopate, 1998: 280). It must have words, whether spoken, subtitled, or intertitled. These must represent a single voice and exclude any collage of quoted texts that do not reflect a 'unified perspective'. The film must be an argument, an attempt at working out a problem; it must put across a personal view, and be well–written (Lopate, 1998: 283). However, his classification is quite prescriptive: no interviews are allowed and no documentaries (Lopate, 1998: 305). Yet, Lopate's examples include Resnais's documentary Night and Fog (1955) and his dictate of 'reasoned, essayistic discourse' seems too narrow from the perspective of visual art, and certainly contradicts his celebration of Marker, whose digressive approach to text and image is deliberate in a spiralling multiplicity that brings to mind, for example, Carlo Emilio Gadda's novels which are equally and intentionally digressive and always on the edge of subverting the integrity of the text, or, perhaps closer to home in a French milieu, Georges Perec's roving pen in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1997) that picks up from the smallest detail of everyday life a point of departure for a long intellectual journey. In this regard, Italo Calvino's 1985 Harvard lecture on multiplicity, later collected in Six Memos of the next Millenium (1993), provides an excellent cultural context for exploring the method and the creative potential of experimenting beyond the limitations of genre from inside, showing how genre can become a nonsense when its border lines are crossed, because you are invited to look at the real differently; true of these filmmakers, true of Calvino himself, true of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni or of Federico Fellini's too."

(David Brancaleone, 2012, Vertigo Magazine)

Brancaleone, D. (2012). "The Interventions of Jean–Luc Godard and Chris Marker into Contemporary Visual Art". Vertigo Magazine. Spring 2012.

Turner Prize 2012 winner: Elizabeth Price

"Elizabeth Price describes her films as moving 'from something that looks like a PowerPoint lecture, to something that looks like an infomercial to something that feels like a cinematic melodrama'. For the Turner Prize exhibition, Price is presenting her video installation THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979 2012. Comprising three parts, the video brings together distinct bodies of material into a dissonant assembly; photographs of church architecture, internet clips of pop performances and news footage of a notorious fire in a Woolworths furniture department in 1979. The film weaves together existing archives of text, image and sound to create video installations that drift between social history and fantasy."

(Tate, UK)

Origamibiro: Quad Time

"Origamibiro is a collaboration between myself and musicians, performers and producers Tom Hill and Andy Tytherleigh. Tom and I have a long history of collaboration through av_dv [Jim Boxall/Jon Gillie], Wauvenfold [Noel Murphy/Tom Hill] and Penfold Plum [Tom Hill]. After creating the first Origamibiro album 'Cracked Mirrors and Stopped Clocks', Tom wanted to find unorthodox ways to produce intimate live music based on generated loops without the audience barrier of laptop screens. Tom's music had a high level of emotional intensity that I felt a real affinity with and wanted to replicate through my visuals. I also wanted to further explore our live setup and find ways to show what we are doing and how we are doing it, as we are doing it. Early on in this process we enlisted the multi instrumentalist skills of Andy Tytherleigh. Andy immediately multiplied layers of melody and atmosphere in the set to create a wider and more beautiful sound."

(Jim Boxall)