Parts
of this essay will be published in 2011 in Marsha
Kinder and Tara McPherson (eds.), Interactive
Frictions,
forthcoming from the University of California Press.
Roberta
Friedman and I produced The Erl King
between 1983 and 1986. It is composed of a cinematic database of
material connected to two 19th century Romantic narrative texts:
Goethe's Erlkoenig,
including the lied set to music by Schubert, and The
Burning Child
Dream as
described by Freud in the last chapter of The
Interpretation of Dreams.
The two stories are each enacted on film in several different ways
and together they form the foundation of the work. We collected and
concocted every possible association with the two texts we could
imagine, no matter how mundane or arcane, both from their own
historical periods and from aspects of the way we realized them on
film, and found ways to picture these associative materials
cinematically. For example, the Schubert lied, sung by Elizabeth
Arnold, was filmed in a studio filled with potted palm trees.
Consequently palm trees became a major theme of the piece, not only
in natural environments and in botanical greenhouses, but also as
printed on Hawaiian shirts. After spray-painting the lines of
Goethe's poem as graffiti on abandoned cars, we took up cars as a
theme, especially damaged or disfunctional examples: we filmed stock
car racing and trips along crowded city thoroughfares. Erkoenig
mentions "wild flowers
blooming on a river bank" in one verse, so we filmed silk tulips
being inserted in the muddy banks of New York's East river as well as
pink rhodendra, reflecting like blood in a muddy brook in the
Botanical Gardens. We also researched Goethe's sources in Danish
folktale, and filmed stories of Sir Olaf and the siren-like fairies
both narrated and enacted. There is much more, but this was the
general iconoclastic approach. About two hours of film and still
images were transferred to tape, and from tape to three laser discs
sides. With the help of Jon Weinbren and Stephen Bannasch, we
developed a computer program to organize, address, and access the
cinematic materials by communicating serially with laser disc
players, eventually enabling the viewer to explore the database by
means of a touch screen. Touching the screen at any moment brings up
a new image, sound, or film-segment, connected by association to the
image touched, and always matched in such a way that there is some
kind of cinematic continuity. The experience of The Erl
King is like wandering
through a landscape where one can collect fragments of stories which
one is able, after a while, to knit together into a coherent
narrative cloth.
In
2003, John Hanhardt and Jon Ippolito, curators at the Guggenheim
Museum, proposed employing The Erl King as
a test case for the concept of media art preservation that the museum
had developed. The key term in their “Variable Media Program” is
emulation, the
idea being that physical devices are emulated in the form of
software structures independent of specific manufacturers or
technologies. The supposition is that specific technologies, both
hardware and software, will become obsolete because of both advances
in technology and the requirements of the market-driven economy.
However, eliminating all products is far from straightforward and may
not be possible, since software development packages require
operating systems (which are usually proprietary), and tend to
exploit the attributes of specific chips and other hardware. But
emulation of hardware on open source software is an ideal that the
Variable Media Initiative is committed to pursuing, despite (or
possibly because of) the pursuit’s utopian underpinnings. And
naturally it was a program I was thrilled to participate in, since
the hardware that The Erl King
depended on was twenty years old and had been off the market for
almost as long.
The
project was to reconstruct The Erl King
as software on a single computer—replacing physical video players,
switchers, and other hardware devices with data files accompanied by
supporting software to access the data and present it as motion
images on screen. The programmer Isaac Dimitrovsky developed a scheme
in which the original Erl King
“limosine” source code was installed on a contemporary computer
and interpreted line-by-line by a program written in the Java
programming language. Video frames are encoded as images, which are
presented on screen, 24 per second, in a simulation of cinema.
Contemporary CPUs and data busses are at last fast enough to handle
video in a way parallel to laser video disc technology. Since each
frame is individually encoded, access to it is random, but now the
frames are digital data, each frame a single image file, rather than
a set of variable physical pits engraved in a groove of a twelve inch
disc. And since access to files on a hard drive is almost
instantaneous, the worst-case one second delay of the video disc
player is eliminated.
However,
this apparent advantage of minimal access time turned out to be
somewhat of a liability. In developing The Erl King,
we were very much aware of the inherent lags and hesitations of the
system, the friction and slippages caused by the physics of real
world gears and bearings. Like the prized delay between pressing a
key and hearing the note in church pipe organs, these infelicities
became something we exploited as the piece developed. The timings and
rhythms of the video flow depend on the ‘grain’ of the system.
The physical limitations of the components of the early 80s were
embedded in the program of The Erl King
to such an extent that they became determinants of the way it
produced meaning.
But
the very first version of the emulated Erl King
had no delays. When I touched the screen, the upcoming video appeared
and began playing immediately. It was so fast that one could not
believe that one’s action had had an effect on the system, and the
power and complexity of the piece dissolved into an arbitrary
porridge with no distinction between viewer-caused changes and those
built in. Isaac Dimitrovsky painstakingly worked on replicating, in
computer code, exactly the right balance of delays and pauses,
distinguishing between those caused by disc search time (which depend
on the distance the focusing head has to travel to find the requested
frame), and the time required for the computer to communicate with
the laser disc players and the touch screen.
It
is an irony that, in order for the emulation to retain a meaning that
had a relationship to the original, the very limitations of the
original had to be reproduced by software, effectively making the
2004 system appear less efficient, and undercutting some of the
advantages and potential of the update.
There
is a way that this point can be generalized. Timothy Binkley argues
strenuously that the computer is not a medium or tool, by which he
means that it does not have inherent characteristics that can be
explored and exposed in kind of modernist gesture. The computer is a
chameleon, the universal tool whose qualities can be defined and
redefined from project to project and from use to use. The
granularities that we depended on so heavily for The Erl
King are material
properties of film, video, and the laser disc player. When everything
becomes software, qualities are indeterminate, undefined until fixed
by code. This is simultaneously the liberation and the burden of
computer-based art.
Versions
Another way of describing the double-edge, the shackles and freedoms simultaneously generated in the conversion to Digital, is in the understanding that the notion of the final or autograph text is an anachronism. Digital technologies facilitate change in places and at stages of production where previously it was highly problematic and consequently exorbitantly expensive. Even after a text has been printed, editorial changes are easily managed, movable type being a long outdated technology, replaced by digital plates output at the touch of a key. Zizek has pointed out that there is no longer such a thing as a ‘master’ text. I may be disappointed in my hope and assumption that this is the master version of this essay.
My
interest in interactivity is tied to the notion that flux is among
the few defining characteristics of the digital. I am seeking a
cinema that encompasses variability while retaining cinematic power,
a cinema based first on random access to its atomic elements, and now
on their digitization. The ironic aspect of the ‘digital emulation’
of The Erl King
is that its digitization undercuts its aura
(in the Benjaminian sense of signs of the artist’s labor ‘marking’
the medium). Qualities that were inherent to the base media can be
peeled away when the base media are no more than simulations, so that
these qualities have to be replicated piece by piece, rather than
worked with and against as currents or resistances in a physical
world. There are no qualities inherent to the digital: the interplay
between artist’s desire and friction-encumbered media vanishes when
every friction and abrasion is deliberately determined, placed there
by the artist.
One
component of The Erl King was
digital from the beginning. This is the routing dataset that defines
the possible paths through the audio-video streams. Each time the
piece was exhibited, we would revise and add to the navigation
database, using the authoring component of the software. Thus, not
only did no two viewers ever see exactly the same sequence of images,
each exhibition (considered as the sum total of all possible paths
through the audio-visual database) was a different version of the
piece. However, the cinematic material, imprinted on the set of laser
discs, remained the same throughout the multiple iterations.
Now
that the cinematic database is digital, it can also be effortlessly
added to or subtracted from. It is as simple to add an image or a
sequence to the database as to change a pathway through the database,
using exactly the same data management techniques. Why would an
artist not improve a piece in any way he could if it was about to be
exhibited again? Digital emulation has disturbed the foundations. The
piece can evolve like a city, until an archaeological study would be
required to reconstruct the original, through traces unearthed;
except that, unlike the physical world, changes of digital data leave
few remains. Had The Erl King
been produced as a 100% digital work (impossible in 1983), the idea
of the an original would be meaningless. Only the physical videodisc
media, encoded with images and sounds, anchor the work. The
Erl King, Sonata
(1991/93), and Frames
(1999)
may be the last
interactive cinema works of mine for which the notion of an original
is tenable. From now on, there will be only versions.
I plan to move on. But at the same time I constantly look back. In life we can look back in anger or regret or satisfaction, we can misremember or lie to ourselves based on our desires or our fears, but we cannot alter the past. However, when we enter the realm of the digital, change will always be an option, removed only when data is burned, encoded, imprinted, etched, painted, chipped, engraved, cut, carved, or bitten into a non-reversible medium.