Show Me Something New

A white wing protrudes into the sky while a skydiver fusses with his helmet-mounted camera. His friend raises a middle finger to the lens by the open airplane door. Dropped into the void and rotating at high velocity, the camera frantically speeds up. The images revolve, emulsifying as if a wire whisk were marbling the cluster of sky and land together. Then they decelerate, now looking and sounding like a strip of film beaming out of an old projector to reveal how the motion was really made a hundred years ago. It carries on, the image quivering with temporal aliasing. Suddenly stabilized, Earth seems like two flattened prokaryotic cells, pulsating and pressing between a band of blue sky with a pinkish lens flare. As the camera starts rushing again toward the Earth, the fata morgana bursts, replaced by a thump, a hit, and a rotation. It lands in the mud, staring toward the sun, which is still encircled by a pinkish flare, but now appears perfectly round. And then, a pig mouth.

Mia Munselle recovered the camera eight months after its descent. The pigs who attempted to devour the GoPro were in her pigpen in Cloverdale, California. The video, which Munselle uploaded to YouTube in 2014, has by now amassed forty-six million views.¹ People spent months analyzing the veracity of the footage; search and you can find innumerable comments, even proper articles by journalists, debating whether it was a string of coincidences or a camera company’s promotional stunt. In forums, many obsessed over the point thirty seconds in when the double Earth stands still: threads full of mathematical equations analyze the speed of fall in comparison to frame rates and shutter speeds, Fourier-analysis charts proving the highs in the audio to be matching the rotations of the video, and so on. I am probably responsible for at least two hundred of those forty-six million views, because I wanted to see, again and again, what it is like to fall out of a plane, to levitate, to split, to strike the Earth, and to be consumed.

Anonymous wrote in the comments: “Reminds me of Snow’s La Région Centrale, just with a digital camera.” In the first few decades of the film camera’s existence, its movements tended to imitate human modes of observing the world—tilt, pan, roll, zoom, and dolly motions mimicked how a person might move, sit, approach, or stand around and watch. Only in its maturity did camerawork start to diverge from everyday ways of seeing, gradually constructing its own language. Michael Snow’s films were a radical leap from the tradition of naturalistic camera motion, as he fostered movements that were improbable to the human eye and body, and, in this way, deconstructed our familiar perception of the world. The root of his pursuit lay in challenging Western ideologies of perception (how cinema proceeds from a constructed perspective in painting), but also challenging the narrative tradition (how it proceeds from the form of a novel). Filming the “world of ordinary objects which consistently adopts a point of view unique to the camera”² facilitated a disembodied mobility in which the spectator became the lone center of all machinic revolutions, composing a unique portrait of pure, roving consciousness.

“The mechanism of our normal consciousness is of a cinematographic nature,” said Bergson.³ This thought will be the guide through some of the recent video works that present themselves as sort of analogues of modes of consciousness, and whose form is generated structurally, using new means. And, last but not least—this may sound a bit contradictory—works that don’t waver from the intuition, either. Which is to say, I want to see the camera think again.

Hollis Frampton’s essay “The Withering Away of the State of the Art” (1974) lays out several similarities and differences between film and video. Coming from an author well known for his purist dedication to film and written in his characteristically unorthodox parlance, the text fashions rare speculation on the uses of video. At the time, it was not entirely certain what video’s future would hold. Frampton reiterated a Bergsonian analogy: “Film and video share, it now seems, an ambition. I have heard it stated in various idioms, with varying degrees of urgency. It first appears whole, to my knowledge, in a text of Eisenstein dating to 1932, at a time when a similarly utopian project, involving the dissolution of the boundaries between subject and object, Finnegans Wake, was actually in progress. That ambition is nothing less than the mimesis, incarnation, bodying forth of the movement of human consciousness itself.”⁴ A few lines down, he goes on to remind us, “Please recall that the images we make are part of our minds; they are living organisms, that carry on our mental lives for us, darkly, whether we pay them any mind or not.”⁵ Frampton died in 1984; he didn’t get to witness the omnipresence of digital video, which entered commercial markets just two years after. But in the time since, these “living images” have become parts of our minds more intimately than anyone could have imagined.

Frampton’s portrayal continues by describing the differences between film and video. It is quite a puzzling analogy: “The photographic cinema must be ‘driven,’ as synthesizer folk say, from the outside. But video can generate its own forms, internally, like DNA. It is the difference between lost-wax casting and making a baby.”⁶ I keep thinking about this last line: on the one hand, the solid material reproduction; on the other, reproduction eternally malleable. One that is inanimate, indebted, rigid, and formal, and the other self-generating, uncontrollable, future-seeking, amoeboid. Additionally, Frampton prophesized that video art must “find its own Muse or else struggle under the tyranny of film.”⁷ So, where is the video’s muse to be found today? Most video art that dominates museum exhibitions and biennials seems to struggle under the inheritance of spectacular form and narrative convention. Most commonly, these videos are a symptom of a well-trodden trifecta. First comes the essay form, fathered by the documentary, with a union of historical and contemporary footage scored by a voice-over, subtitles, or both, whose ultimate goal is to instruct and deliver a research-based practice. Secondly, the polished cinema-grade HD video, which takes up a large wall or illuminates a black box in all its presentational grandeur. Its presence is crisp, affective, and often scored by a composer; it exhibits state-of-the-art technology and skill, and usually clings to the formal and narrative structures affirmed by mainstream cinema and streaming providers. And lastly, there is a form which is a gallimaufry of types shanghaied from specialized commercial productions (animation, 3D, choreographed video, music video, nature or underwater documentary, et cetera). Like matryoshka dolls, all three of these forms also fit inside each other in different proportions. As much as their components and appearances are miscible and pliant, a presentational convention of continuity, form, and narrative determines the viewing experience.

In the era of all-surrounding images, a type of blindness occurs. With everything so clearly exposed, the viewer’s mind atrophies, leaving little space for the dialectical gears to turn. So let’s return to that camera in the pigpen, and why it was mentioned in the first place. Contending with the speed and the virtue of an accident, the camera lays itself bare. Pushed beyond the limits of its utility to fathom an erroneous reproduction of reality, it pictures things that would be otherwise unimaginable: “the very reality it conveys insofar as it makes the ‘unseen’ visible, that is to say, a world-without-memory and of unstable dimension.”⁸ Alacrity is present in the moments of “picnoleptic crisis” (so says Virilio).⁹ The unseen results in the effect of reality. This is an important lesson: The velocity at which things are filmed doesn’t exist, and this is the pure invention of the cinematographic motor, a quality well known from its beginnings. Georges Méliès, who likewise liked to record all sorts of things out of his control—birds in flight, insects, fluid dynamics, and nervous maladies, especially epilepsy—said, “The trick, intelligently applied, today allows us to make visible the supernatural, the imaginary, even the impossible.”¹⁰ Contemporary video seems to have much more to do with Méliès than with the Lumières.

When the curtain is pulled back in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and the old man is seen at his machine, we realize he is only human. In Return to Oz (1985), another mechanical man, who goes by the name of Tik-Tok, appears. He cannot wind up his clockwork for himself, which causes him to lose power and speak gibberish. They say the app TikTok wasn’t named after him, but after the clock-like succession of the short videos on an infinite scroll, which is intended to be viewed swiftly, as in a countdown, so you’ll never think to hit pause.

Expose the humming cogs behind the video, and the viewer enters a state of unrest: She must continuously negotiate this anomalous mode of production. The state of “attentive tension” for the viewer—or a reader—conjures the space to think critically. Cue Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device” (1917), an essay about prose: Undisclosed, the device surrenders to being “automatized.” It leaves the viewer outside of doubt: She becomes a receiver. Once the stylistic or technical device has been laid bare (ostranenied), it can change our relationship with the work, which is now perceived as artificially constructed instead of natural, given.

The flicker¹² is no longer in the machine. It is now generated by a mutual agitation of the apparatus and the body: A finger tap-tap-taps on the phone, producing a burning warmth every time its soft tip touches the glass. It is like a metronome, but instead of feeding a consistent pulse to a production, it yields an invisibility, a distraction. It wavers between absolute closeness and a nifty bit of distance. Part of Carolyn Lazard’s two-channel video installation RED (2021), a flicker film made by a finger rhythmically touching the cell phone lens. It is governed by a lived, subjective sense of time without a clock—a tempo where the body’s capacity gives a count, and not the other way around. It is also a measure of physiological distance between you and the device, equal to this screen between you and me when we speak, or the distance between you and this text in your hand.

RED, in all its simplicity, is an immensely complex film. Resisting being yoked to representation, it sweeps it away using things at hand (literally). Disabling the primary purpose of this device—which is to represent, visually, and communicate, literally—it guides us to a pure idea instead, namely that the sense of proximity is created not by recognition, nor by representation, but by a vision. It means that it can be equally ours, as much as it is yours or mine. It creates access for everyone.

Tapping the screen to answer the call, the glass of the screen reflects a familiar image in the other. The author stands as omnipresence and obfuscation. Though absent in the space of projection, Lazard’s presence is sensed phenomenologically—similar to Margaret Raspé’s camera helmet recording the beating and whipping of the cream in her kitchen, or to Hollis Frampton burning on the stove every last photograph that he will tell you about, but not just yet.¹³ The gap that is formed, either in identification or in continuity of recollection, invokes an alogical and dynamic mental state, which is a state of production for the viewer.

In a different video, when we do see the author, she is hard to recognize under the mask. Asta Lynge’s How soft your fields so green, can whisper tales of gore (2021) shares with RED some of the penchants of structural film; here, Lynge is caught on a 360-degree camera as she observes herself stealing a bulb of garlic from a fluorescent-lit wholesale supermarket. All swollen and self-absorbing, the bulb and the video mimic each other in shape. In the perpetual hum and the fluorescent hypervisibility, the one thing that indeed disappears is the camera. Unable to capture itself, it produces a tangible, vacuum-like force toward the center of the screen, which in turn evacuates the device. The hand holds what the eye cannot. The apparatus here is a total absence, negativity, null and void. In the video nothing more happens, just a sensation of endless folding and gyrating. As Lynge traverses the aisles, they curl back in the shape of history. The Arcades fold toward her and into the body to the point where we don’t know who is consuming whom. It’s just as they could, and will, disappear into each other. These are the moments of total expenditure.

Almost an opposite feeling is evoked by Nicole-Antonia Spagnola’s work, which produces a sensation of a disaffected déjà vu. Ragged Dick (2023) takes a form of a Chaplinesque loop, shot on black-and-white 8mm film. Yet, below the antiquated grain is a crispness and costume and a digital hum, clearly disclosing its contemporaneity and inauthenticity. The video is a continual stream of a three-minute sequence of a vagabond child, based on the namesake Horatio Alger’s nineteenth-century bildungsroman. Set in New York, the original portrays a poor bootblack rising to middle-class respectability through hard work, which in the YouTube-ified adaptation is set back through a roundabout of earning, spending, dying, and waking up to another day. But the video is neither a simple remake nor narrative storytelling; its form exists as a container for distrust in the possibility of authentic, authorial production.

The pseudo-historical genre perfectly embodies a socially necessary illusion of social mobility and self-reliance. It also shears down on what today appears like an overproduction of heterogeneous, customized, authentic content, but what is actually, as Anna Kornbluh diagnoses, a monoculture—a homogenous, endlessly reproducible stream: “The stream is circulation, infrastructure and modality for the exchange of moving images, and in the era of its dominance, the stream retroacts the images themselves.”¹⁴ Being more a flow than a thing, Ragged Dick is caught in a dizzying loop of cycles of reproduction that mirror history. With its mining of the residual cinematic memory to extract a genre derivative, it couldn’t end otherwise but with an anticlimax.

All three of the above videos use the camera as a thinking tool to different ends. They are about something being produced and not reproduced. They show us things we can sometimes recognize, but that are most likely not about any of those recognizable things. They are not about description, but process. Sometimes they employ, as I mentioned before, the instruments of structural film, thinking through the economy of means to produce “audiovisual objects whose most striking characteristic is their overall shape.”¹⁵ Their originality derives from resistance to the new as a prerequisite. At the same time, their production distrusts any obsession with excess and novelty. But these films also evoke broader concerns inherent to how we perceive and rework the world in our heads, through continuous distraction, anxiety, and inundation: They interrogate the things we consume, instead of letting us be simply consumed by them.