Art installation project: Interval (2018)
D. N. RodowickTwo looped HD video projections, color, silent; nineteen digital prints In 1983, I completed a film entitled 1963 (a meditation on history and violence), which would prove to be my last circulating analog work. Made twenty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 1963 was meant to be a contemplative investigation of the relation between image and memory, and indeed image as a medium that obscures memory as much as preserving or transmitting it. The paradox here is that the more traumatic the historical event, the more images and documents proliferate around it, clouding or fogging the experience to such an extent that one only sees the obscuring haze. Moreover, that haze fills the space around and between us to the extent that we no longer see one another and communicate historical experience directly. Support for the polis is no longer intersubjectivity and attention to others, but rather our blind attempts to navigate the information fog that surrounds and separates us. The source material for 1963 was a copy of Abraham Zapruder's 8mm footage of the Kennedy assassination, itself filmed in color Super-8 off of the screen of a small black and white video monitor as it was broadcast on national television. Already twice mediated, this 26.6 seconds of images was then blown up to 16mm and step-printed at one frame-per-second, slowing and obscuring the image while bringing forward the textures of its electronic and photochemical mediations. In 1963, the step-printed sequence is repeated once—history repeats itself, at least in images. Kennedy's 100 th birthday took place on 29 May 2017, and we are now more than fifty years past the traumatic year of 1963. In the intervals of time that have now past between and beyond 1963 and 1983, I have often thought about returning to these materials, but in expanded form and using digital means. Interval is thus a new iteration of my ongoing interest in the fading of memory and historical experience as a function of image and medium. My intuition here is that the mediated images that comprise our collective memory of historical events are subject in complex ways to temporal erosion, where duration becomes distended and elliptical, gapped and perforated, and space is clouded by a thickening or sedimentation of time perceived as indistinct layerings of the past and the present in uneven rhythms.
