[spectre] Hidden Worlds: screening & lecture

[Redazione Digicult]

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HIDDEN WORLDS
screening & lecture
by Digicult / Marco Mancuso


16th International Conference of Film Studies
"Cinema & Energy"

Rome, Teatro Palladium, "Roma Tre" University
8-11 December 2010
Link to video collection and description: 
http://www.digicult.it/public/screening_eng.doc



>From the mid-Nineties, "Roma Tre" University's Department of Communication 
and Spectacle (Di.Co.Spe.) reflects on changes in cinema and other arts, 
analysing new tendencies and perspectives linked to the evolution of 
languages, modes of production and making of films. The Conference for 2010 
will be on the relationship between "Cinema and Energy", being energy a 
concept that invest social life all over the world (besides of human science 
and scientific research).

Cinema histories often write about relationship between cinema and 
technology, underlining that cinema is the technological art par excellence, 
because it was born during industrial revolution and because its 
optical-chemical-mechanical device derives from scientific experiments on 
stroboscopic effect and movement's deconstruction. Cinema histories also 
specify all technological conquers that have brought forward cinema 
expression, such as synchronization of sound, colour, lightening, film 
emulsions and so forth. Besides, contemporary reflections about 
 "remediation" between cinema, television and new media highlight the 
redefinition of filmic language, because of the mingling between analogical 
and digital technologies.

Nevertheless, energy, in which all these process are rooted and that gives 
form and meaning to cinema, is often neglected in contemporary studies. But 
energy is considered in other science - from biology to chemic to 
astrophysics - as the most important and engaging field for research, 
present and future. Just think about that 80% of cosmic energy called "dark 
energy" (in relation with the "dark matter"), that is defined "dark" because 
is still unknown; in this sense, really interesting are recent observations 
about neutrinos made by CERN and Gran Sasso laboratories.

The conference will map the relationship between cinema and energy, showing 
an articulated picture of various ways to understand this relationship in 
filmic and audiovisual language and forms through history.

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A MYRIAD OF VIBRANT PHENOMENA
THE HIDDEN WORLDS OF AUDIOVISUAL ART-SCIENCE
Lecture by Marco Mancuso / Digicult


Between 1899 and 1904 the german philosopher and biologist Ernst Haeckel 
published Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature), one of his best known 
works and a symbol of his zoological research and philosophy, centered on 
the observation of marine micro-organisms as well of various natural species 
and animals. The complete volume, consisting of over 100 lithographs, each 
accompanied by a short descriptive text, obtained a great success even among 
the non-specialist public and among some Art Nouveau artists, committed to 
find new models to be used in the nascent industrial design and in 
architecture. In this regard, the volume lends itself to multiple 
assessments: as a zoological work depicting the evolution of organisms, as a 
work of art and as a work of aesthetics that focuses on seeing and 
perception as a way of knowing. Aesthetics, as the science of beauty, intent 
on understanding the nature in relation to art.

The tables of the book, according to a geometric arrangement of the 
drawings, are based upon the microscopic siliceous skeletons of radiolarians 
and diatoms, the umbrellas of the jellyfishes, the tentacles of sea anemones 
and spirals shells of molluscs. These illustrations depict therefore the law 
that regulates natural energy phenomena: the evolution, the fact that 
organisms are formed and transformed over time, according to genetic 
relationships of descent, from a common original type. In other words, by 
analyzing the tables of his rich classification, it is wonderful to see how 
nature is not only capable of spontaneously creating veritable art forms, 
but also of establishing a direct connection between a certain algebraic and 
geometric aesthetics, starting from a fundamental unit/core and reaching a 
more complex entity, a consequent evolutionary practice of adaptation.

Moreover, one of the most currently fascinating mathematical theories is no 
doubt the theory of fractals: according to the definition of its recently 
passed away discoverer, the polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1975), 
who started his researched form the fractal structure found out by french 
mathematicia Gaston Julia in 1920, fractals are geometrical figures 
characterized by a repetition to infinity of a same pattern on a more and 
more reduced scale. Nature is in fact filled with forms very similar to 
fractals, which don't follow in any way any of the rules of Euclidean 
geometry. A coastline, the branches or the roots of a tree, a cloud, the 
snowflakes, the zigzag lightning bolts and the leaf venation patterns: these 
are only a few examples of fractal forms spontaneously creating in nature.

Among these ones there is the spiral, the fractal form par excellence. The 
procedural, generative, hieratic and evolutionary element can therefore be 
considered the key of this thought, turned to a modern "computational 
ecology": almost 40 years of study, analysis and research have passed 
between Alan Turing's revolutionary theories about morphogenesis (the 
capability of every living being to develop complex bodies starting from 
very simple elements, using self-assembling processes without an external 
guide), which followed those by bio-mathematician Thompson D'Arcy in his 
work On the growth and form (1917), and more recent studies (1980-1985) on 
genetic algorithms (a particular kind of evolutionary algorithms utilizing 
mutation, selection and other recombination techniques in order to guarantee 
a certain number of abstract representations of possible solution for 
optimization to become better solutions). Those researches were meant to 
point out the almost computational characteristics of Mother Nature on one 
hand, while on the other they confirmed the analog/digital machines' 
capability of simulating and replicating complex natural phenomena.

These examples show clearly how nature is characterized at the root by a 
matrix of numbers and mathematical expressions involving a series of 
physical, optical, chemical-physical, electromagnetic and nanometric 
phenomena influencing its forms, species, colours, sounds and structures. If 
science is considered an organic complex of knowledge obtained through a 
methodical procedure, capable of providing a precise description of the real 
aspect of things and the laws by which the phenomena happen, and if the 
rules governing such process are generally called "scientific method", then 
the experimental observation of a natural event, the formulation of a 
general hypothesis about such event and the possibility of checking the 
hypothesis through subsequent observations become fundamental elements in 
modern scientific research.

All of this is really evident in some video works that have been collected 
within the screening Hidden Worlds, a critical reflection upon the existing 
connection between audiovisual art, energy and science on the borders of 
cinema, video and digital. A project that was born from a lecture held at 
Science Museum in Naples in 2008 followed by the curatorship at Sincronie: 
music and astronomy festival in 2009. Hidden Worlds doesn't some pioneering 
works which were not possible to include in the screening, like the studies 
on Cymatics carried out by naturalist Hans Jenny that explain how every 
existing sound can be reproduced starting from a waveform visualizable 
through precise geometrical forms, depending on the medium used. Moreover, 
some Mary Ellen Bute's works like Abstronic, that examine the expressive 
potentialities of the electrons flow within a cathode ray tube, shooting the 
film with a number of abstract animations to the rhythm of music. And Johny 
Whitney finally, who with Permutations, applied his "Computational 
Periodics" theories to the field of computer graphic, obtaining a "series of 
harmonic events in the audiovisual introduction", where a specific 
simulation of a musical progression can be achieved through the multiple 
superimposition of graphic objects.

What it is today recognized as "immersive art-science" is a form of creative 
expression meant to rise above the notion of art as abstract representation, 
in behalf of a multi-sensorial experience. The purpose here is to create 
aesthetical fascinating objects and also to invite the public to go beyond 
ordinary perception's border. Immersivity awakens a synesthetic awareness 
both in the mental and in the physic space. A myriad of vibrant phenomena, 
usually beyond the observer's reach, are instead made reachable through an 
accurate psychophysical conditioning.

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HIDDEN WORLDS
Videoscreening curated by Marco Mancuso / Digicult


The Hidden Worlds exhibition celebrates one of the most fascinating yet 
obscure territories of artistic audiovisual contemporary research: the 
relation between art and science. The video screening produces works that 
induce into a critical reflection on the existing relation between 
audiovisual contemporary artistic research (as regards to cinema, video and 
digital experiences) and applied sciences.

This project, dealing with different artistic examples which investigate new 
expressive forms for the representation of the sound-image relation, 
deliberately avoids focusing on the existing common aesthetics among them, 
as well as on a possible expressive language. It rather suggests an overview 
on specific systems for sensorial perception, and emotional mechanisms of 
"saturation", achieved through the use of hybrid techniques, that today like 
never before expand the tradition of analog experimental cinema and digital 
audiovisuals.

This video screening takes the spectators to wonderful "hidden worlds", 
illustrated by artists and scientists who more and more often collaborate 
and share experiences with one another on the research of new expressive 
potentialities within specific mathematical processes and physical, optical, 
chemical and electro-magnetic phenomena.

By watching the audiovisual representation of the existing energetic and 
electromagnetic phenomena on the  Sun's surface and of current interferences 
generated from interaction of electromagnetic fields between the Sun and 
Earth, as possible instrument of aestheticization of the space phenomena by 
the Semiconductor duo (in works such as Black Rain and Brilliant Noise), the 
passage to the audiovisual representation of chemical-physical-optical 
reactions of the Portable Palace duo (Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand) is 
extraordinary short indeed. In their first work present in this exhibition, 
(Camera Lucida) they study the chemical-physical phenomena of 
"sonoluminescence", while in their second one (10000 Peackcock Feathers in 
Foaming Acid) they analyze the potentialities of optical phenomena generated 
by investigating the laser light within the nanometric structures of foams. 
Moreover, if the work on "chemical grams" by the video maker Jurgen Reble 
(Materia Obscura) underlines the structures born out of a film's chemical 
corrosion, in the same way the first work by Thorsten Fliesch present in the 
exhibition (Energie!) shows the scorches on photographic paper produced by 
an high potential energy flow of an electron beam contained in a cathode ray 
tube.

The number is an ever present concept, being the fundamental element of 
every mathematical and algebraic formula which involves not only a single 
energy phenomenon present in nature, but also a series of 
disturbing/superimposition phenomena, such as interferences, beats, 
accumulations, harmonies and other optical event, like Moirè's (optical 
illusion created by geometrical sequences of interference phenomena), as 
shown by the purely glitch and software works by Carsten Nicolai (Spray) and 
Karl Kliem (Vienna Concert !! Excerpts).

The number, in its highest abstraction of key element for a fourth dimension 
representation , is still an important part of Thorsten Fleisch's video 
(Gestalt), a sort of recognition of the quaternion worlds (four-dimensional 
fractals) visualized in a three dimensional space through appropriate 
software. Yet maybe John Campbell's masterpiece (LI: The Patterns of Nature) 
is the work that mostly evidences the geometric structures spontaneously 
present in Nature, through a kind of magical and hypnotic audiovisual 
document, perfect sample of a deep critical conviction: contemporary 
audiovisual art, today more than in the past, has the technological 
instruments and the ethical duty to confront itself with the empirical world 
and the "natural" technologies within it. Technologies that should be 
collected, observed and manipulated by man, who has already given proof of 
his skill with light, sound, image and space.