Sally Golding

Article Expanded Cinema Unowned: Noise and Liveness in the Contemporary, published by the San Francisco Cinematheque, 2016

Authors: Steve Polta, Sally Golding; Editor: Steve Polta; Layout & Design: Tooth

Perpetual Motion documents San Francisco Cinematheque’s massive series of contemporary Performance Cinema, presented September–December 2016 at San Francisco’s Gray Area. The largest undertaking in Cinematheque’s 55-year history, this series convened Performance Cinema practitioners from around the world—including arc, Scott Arford, Biege, John Davis, Trinchera Ensamble, Keith Evans, Sally Golding, Ken Jacobs, Kerry Laitala & Voicehandler, Karl Lemieux & BJ Nilsen, Hangjun Lee & Jérôme Noetinger, Michael A. Morris, Bruce McClure, Greg Pope & Sult, Raha Raissnia & Panagiotis Mavridis, La Révélateur and Jürgen Reble—for 7 incredible convergences of once-in-a-lifetime sight and sound.

Dynamically designed by tooth, the hand-made Perpetual Motion ‘zine includes a live cinema manifesto by series curator Steve Polta, an essay surveying the field by renowned curator/historian (and performance cinema practitioner) Sally Golding and copious images of series participants. Available exclusively at the 2016 screenings, the Perpetual Motion ’zine publication is now available worldwide as a FREE digital download in pdf format.

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PLEASE NOTE: This download is FREE and features the full articles. However please consider donating to the San Francisco Cinematheque – one of the most globally historical and contemporary important cultural organisations operating today. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation here

Issues in Contemporary Expanded Cinema: A discussion with Sally Golding and James Holcombe chaired by Cathy Rogers is a platform for thinking through concerns in materiality, presentation, community and politics in expanded cinema.

In this article Golding, Holcombe and Rogers discuss ideas of community, politics and the practical strategies of contemporary live film performance from both a practitioner’s and curator’s perspective.

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The Contact Festival included the work of over 70 artists and filmmakers, featuring single-screen films, multi-screen/performance-related works and site-specific installations. Accompanied by a publication including discussion pieces by Luke Aspell and collective-iz (on collective practices), Sally Golding, James Holcombe and Cathy Rogers (on different manifestations of contemporary expanded cinema), and short essays by Maria Palacios Cruz (LUX, Deputy Director), William Fowler (BFI, curator of artists’ moving image) and Nicky Hamlyn (filmmaker and writer), plus complete listings.

Contact is a series of screenings, events and exhibitions, involving contemporary experimental film/video and other art forms, organised by Andrew Vallance and Simon Payne. Contact Festival took place in May 2016 at Apiary Studios, London. Funded by Arts Council England.

A new publication by the Austrian Cultural Forum London edited by Sally Golding. Featuring new conversations and critical urgencies in digital art with contributions by practitioners and curators.

Editor:
Sally Golding

Authors:
Addie Wagenknecht
Alex McLean & Ellen Harlizius-Klück
Irini Papadimitriou (V&A)
Luba Elliott
Manuela Naveau (Ars Electronica)
Martin Zeilinger
Sally Golding

Publisher: Austrian Cultural Forum London (ACF), 2018
Designer: Lisa Stephanides, Polimekanos
Cover Image: Alex McLean, weaving code
Contents: 124 pages, colour and b&w
ISBN: 978-9999269-3-9-1

Alex McLean in collaboration with Ellen Harlizius-Klück, along with Martin Zeilinger, reflect on ideas gleaned from deep-research projects which consider the algorithm as a fundamental process essential to understanding digital contexts. McLean and Harlizius-Klück discuss their research which introduces McLean’s own innovative open source software TidalCycles to the historical weaving loom, to expand the notion of ‘algorithmic dance culture’. Zeilinger presents his ongoing project Pattern Recognition which foregrounds the importance of a critical research-practice to consider how evolving machine agency in artist–computer collaboration shifts our understanding of ‘authorship’ and ‘cultural ownership’.

Luba Elliott and Addie Wagenknecht bring fresh discussion and opinion to the field of digital art critique from their individual perspectives as practitioners. Elliott describes a path towards a comprehensive critique of digital art as one that now must consider a ‘familiarity with emerging technical features, an anthropological perspective [...], and an awareness of the global political situation’. Wagenknecht considers how we might better use machine learning systems in order to produce diverse and engaging art made by means of artificial intelligence, which might be more seriously critiqued within larger and historical art canons.

Manuela Naveau (Head of Ars Electronica Export), Irini Papadimitriou (Digital Programmes Manager at the V&A) and myself, Sally Golding (artist, and director and producer of the independent curatorial series Unconscious Archives) connect interests in exploring digital art through recent public projects. Naveau considers a 19th-century engraving as a mechanism for discussion to convey her enthusiasm for supporting today’s young artists via the international forum of the Ars Electronica Export programme. Papadimitriou addresses the museum’s role in initiating and shaping critical discussions around the impact of technology in society and culture, by drawing inspiration from literary sources and her own involvement with the Digital Design Weekend programme at the V&A in London. In my own article I attempt to diversify the conversation in digital arts by offering creative and personal ideas reflecting on technology and archiving while concurrently discussing artworks exhibited in the exhibition ‘Emotion + the Tech(no)body’, programmed by Unconscious Archives as part of the ACF’s digital arts strand. - Sally Golding, August 2018

Parsing Digital: Conversations in digital art by practitioners and curators is an Occasions 18 edition, a project initiated by the Austrian Cultural Forum London facilitating ongoing cultural exchange.

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Palpable, Gaze is a participatory installation which narrativizes and visualizes the algorithmic gaze in 3D space as a method of self portraiture. Concerning perception and considering the democratic aspect of both ‘visual operators’ gazing in awareness at one another’s presence - the installation proposes a situation in which the viewer is actively aware of, and participant in, photographic 'looking'.

Synopsis
Technological evolution within the long history of photographic portraiture has brought about a unique situation in which the image can now ‘see’ us. Palpable, Gaze seeks to underline the intangible aspects of the the viewer’s relationship to the algorithmic gaze by creating an intimate experience imagining the process of computational ‘looking’, while considering our sense of perception within the context of self portraiture.

Under the political tone of facial recognition technology within surveillance, and potential applications such as neuromarketing via eye tracking technology, the emerging photographic act of seeing is an invisible experience in which we shift from being the subject to becoming subjected. Social and industrial trends within photographic processes form part of the system of critique – photography has always offered a form of ‘inner reflection’ from the earliest experimental photochemical self portraits to the over proliferation of selfie culture.

No longer object based and fixed in time, the photographic is now highly ‘unfixed’. Ubiquitous within our lives, a personal photograph has the potential to generate big data – placing power in unseen hands and eroding our capacity to use photography as our own reflexive psychological and social tool.

Throughout history those in positions of power (manufacturers, trained photographers, editors and publishers) have applied a lens to gender, race, ethnicity and social stratification. Therefore, by imagining photographic vision in 3D space, Palpable, Gaze questions if there is there a potential reversal of power in democratising the act of emerging photographic vision over succumbing to and privileging the multifarious gaze.

Installation Design
A participant enters a dark space, and once present within the room encounters a succession of thin light beams which activate to ‘fire’ towards them. As the participant moves about the space the beams continue to emerge in reaction to their presence – mimicking the scientific process of angles of incidence measured between an algorithmic vision system and a subject’s own gaze – in this case represented by a programmed array of LED lights and the participant’s own bodies moving through the space. An enlargement of this process, usually conducted using near infrared light invisible to our own eyes which is sent from the vision system reflecting off our cornea, the beams are instead experienced in an ‘exposed’ and tangible way, made physical through the presence of haze within the space. Modelled on studies of eye tracking which represent data showing a subject’s path of gaze via both heat maps and graphical design patterns, the gaze within the space is a fictional narrative conducted in real time.

Project Credits
Palpable, Gaze is a research and development project funded by:
ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND, DEVELOPING YOUR CREATIVE PRACTICE

With thanks to advisory support from Irini Papadimitriou (Future Everything), Dr John Greenwood (Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London) and Matt Spendlove (Spatial).

Development & Staging
Currently, Palpable, Gaze has been developed to concept phase.

Enquires
If you would like to enquire about hosting this participatory installation, please contact the artist directly: Sally Golding – sally@otherfilm.org