Butcher Rules
A still from Ecstatic Gardens into Dissemblamation
Todd Jurgess Since its birth, the cinema has been preternaturally obsessed with two terms: nature and industry. We can see it everywhere: from Ozu to Murnau to Brakhage through to Jacqueline Goss, Daïchi Saïto, and Greta Snider. In many ways, this state of affairs makes perfect sense. The cinema’s specificity is partly based on its application of natural materials made into animated photograms through an industrial apparatus. Historically, photography and cine-ma emerged in the midst of the romanticist revival and the industrial revolution, twin, divi-sive influences uneasily contained in cinema’s wavering between technophobic pessimism and illuminative positivist tendency.
industrial era, the digital apparatus is based in an abstract, seemingly space-less area of quantifiable information. This non-space seems to reject any representative capacity, as the layers of (nonsensible) code could go on ad-infinitum. Secondly and more importantly, though, the relation between the digital and the “real,” phenomenal world has yet to be figured out. In the 20s, people like Walter Benjamin and Siegfriend Kracauer saw in the mechanical illusion of cinema a correlate for industrial processes and the chaos of urban space. What would this visual equivalent for the digital be? Is there any relation between the very irreal space of algorithmic information and that of “the wind in the trees?”
Yet, 100-some-odd years later, we find ourselves looking at a new apparatus with its own term, a third term for the cinema: digital information. As some scholars have noted, digital info poses new problems to representation. First and foremost, how can you depict it? Unlike the classic apparatus, which could find its equal in the production lines, motors, gears and pulleys of the
Ecstatic Gardens into Dissemblamation” explores these three terms and tries to put into images the emerging relationship between them. As I made the project, I really wanted to work against a dominant paradigm of DV in both the film industry and much independent work, which treat DV, whether high-def or whatever, as a kind of transparent intermediary for the world. That is to
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