Intermission

Posted by in Media Work, on October 10, 2015

Collaboration with Eric Snodgrass

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Abstract:
Intermission
is a performative redadaction of the poetics of cinema. The performance and media platform utilizes René Clair’s Entr’acte (a collaboration with Picabia and Satie) as a starting point, reimagining cinema as if the Dadaist vision for the medium had become the prevalent form. In fact, we call this sort of performative cinema entr’activism – a form of participatory filmic event in which cinema is mobilized as the physical borders of frames leak back into a precarious hyper-reality that emphasizes the metanoic qualities of being in-between acts of viewing.

We live amidst an ecology of screens. What does this progression and diffusion of screens in all resolutions mean for film? Cinema remains an emphatically passive medium. Perhaps the digital age is now, at least in part, driving the filmic medium from its own monolithic domestication of the spectator.

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Entr’activism, in its role as intermissionary, resists the passive and the active, remaining in flux. It does not shy away from the presence of ancestors or from contemporary celebrity; Rather, entr’activism readily tips its hat to(ward) various “turns” it sees in play at any given time. The entr’active “turn”, however, can never be a turn in its own right as it is only ever the act of turning itself. Turning away, turning towards, turning off, turning on, turning around, and turning over.

This is the abattoir of cinema. The carcass of cinema will now be subjected to its own intermission to mitigate its taphonomy. Through the intervention of entr’activism the cinematic carcass may be transformed to avulse any residual traces of mea[t|ning].

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Performance:
The performance included live video mixing, reading from a combinatorial script, and live recreations of specific references to René Clair’s Entr’acte. In addition, electronic music was composed for the performance, in four movements, loosely based on the scores of Satie’s Relâche and Cinéma.

Soundtrack

WORK DETAIL (PDF)

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