revision COMPLETE scheduled for publication
Christopher Thompson
Christopher Thomps An artist's statement
In Ralph Fiennes (1995), a torrent of a Hollywood blockbuster adapts a futurist narrative for the advancement of moist reality, in which the hierarchy between “real life” and “virtual reality” becomes
obscured and or irrelevant. The video is comprised of footage of the 1995 Kathryn Bigelow film Strange Days, which creates a sense of impending societal disintegration and disarray. Based in LA at the turn of the new millennium, the world is consumed by anarchic crime and environmental decay, there is no where to
In the video, time has collapsed into a perpetual nonlinear Hollywood trailer. The incessant drone builds to an elusive climax while the original dialogue from the film Strange Days is replaced by exchanges of apocalyptic revelations. Melodramatic and superficial, the subtitles borrow from various prophetic texts and blockbuster films, which in turn foreshadow the Fin de siècle.
Ralph Fiennes (1995) 2014, 9:30 minutes, color, stereo, 16:9, NTSC English/subtitles, single channel video
on turn but to the artificial sensations of the new virtual world. In Ralph Fiennes (1995), VR functions not only as an escape, but as a rapturous resolution for the new millennium, a means to an end for a world always on the brink of collapse.
Fiennes’ ecstatic visions of the digital avatar foretell of the inevitable upgrade and of the growing superiority of VR. Every form of human development has been met with dire consequences for our environment. To produce a world for us, by us, we are to dictate our own rules and disregard the restrictions of the “natural” world. In Ralph Fiennes (1995) production isn’t merely process, but a kind of futurist ideology of convenience. Digital formats allow us to design new environments unbound by the physical world’s ecology, allowing capitalism and commerce to reach their ultimate forms. The hypercapitalist nature of the web and other virtual environments in turn, aids our upgrade into digital beings, allowing us to immigrate from the wasteland of our physical reality to the sterile virtual realm. As Fiennes pushes his virtual product from buyer to buyer, his revelations grow stronger, and the distinction between the real and the virtual become less apparent. His constitution drifts from profound coolness to acute violence, as the schizophrenic narrative progresses through various clips in the film. Interjected by a strobing green screen, their reality is in between production; a neverending state of rendering.
An interview with
Christopher Thompson In your work Ralph Fiennes 1995 the linear narration continuously collapses, sabotaging the common perception mechanism like in the films of the French director Alain-Robbe Grillet. We have found fascinating your concept of time: could you introduce our readers to this aspect of your filmmaking? In Ralph Fiennes (1995), time collapses into a perpetual non-linear Hollywood trailer. The video only hints at a central narrative, which in turn gives way to a montage of footage of the Katherine Bigelow film Strange Days and various computer-generated imagery. The traileresque editing gives structure to the pacing of the video but also conceptually supports the schizophrenic narrative that is instituted by Fiennes’ prophetic visions of virtual reality. Though the structure of my videos create nonlinear narratives similar to Grillet’s work, I’ve become less interested in art house cinema, and more engaged in the trailers for Hollywood blockbusters, like Prometheus (2012), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and The Dark Knight (2008), which edits the films into more action-packed, dramatic, shallow versions of themselves. My superficialization of narrative through the use of non-linear editing serves as a form of compression, editing video to its most garish shots. The Fin de siècle theme is ironically faced in Ralph Fiennes. How did you come up with the idea for this work? In my work, I refer to Y2k as a catalyst of change for economies, politics, and culture. Though most would concern Y2k as an anticlimactic disaster, it created a market of fear that still resonates in our digital culture (via I Love You and Heartbleed viruses). The hysteria that surrounded its hold on the decade was not just based on our paranoia of a digitally reliant civilization, but also the cultural, political, and
Christopher Thompson
religious uncertainty in a new millennium. I remember sitting around the lunch table with friends in elementary school in December ’99, discussing all the paranoia surrounding the new millennium and the Y2k bug. While none of us really had a coherent understanding of the siutation, we thought something big was going to happen. Some of us thought it had something to do with a computer virus. I recall a kid across the table from us warning us of the impending rapture, heralding the news of a new era of man. What still astounds me about the countdown to Y2k is the diversity of the paranoia and the marketability of its mania. Throughout the decade, Y2k operated as the most successful brand of the 90s. Everyone was talking about it, and some were hoarding in preparation, while others were celebrating it. As a consumer of the
A Still from Ralph Fiennes (1995)
brand in my Y2k t-shirt and cap, I too watched the crystal ball drop in Times Square, awaiting a new era.
globalized world have left our governments, markets, and politics predestined to failure; convenience triumphs over survival.
In Ralph Fiennes (1995), there is a scene taken from the 1995 film Strange Days, in which Tom Sizemore’s character Max toasts to the end of the world,
We would like to know more about your found footage manipulation: how did you develop this personal style?
“You know how I know it’s the end of the world? Everything’s already been done. Every kind of music’s been tried, every kind of government’s been tried, every fucking hairstyle, bubble gum flavors, you know, breakfast cereal...What are we going to do? How are we going to make another thousand years? I’m telling you, man, it’s over. We used it all up.” Max’s nihilistic attitude is a crass but realistic sentiment not only for Y2k, but also for 2014. Y2k exists for every generation as a metaphorical disaster waiting to test our willingness to adapt, prepare, and progress. With the overwhelming threat of rising of sea levels, wealth disparity, and economic unrest, why even bother resisting? The conditions of our post-
The use of found footage in my practice is dictated by the politics of convenience, through the use of illegal torrents and unauthorized screencaps. My work is based on the accessibility of information and commerce, where online streaming and torrented films disregard cinema for the laptop. For myself, using torrented footage is a political choice, which in turn influences every aspect of my practice, from my process to distribution. Torrenting and filesharing represent the old utopian vision of the web that died in the late 90s – early 2000s, giving way to corporatization and surveillance. I don’t villainies the web 2.0, but rather endorse its capitalist modes of operation. This conflict of principles shapes the aesthetics of the work through its depiction of ideology and the stylistic embrace of corporate logotypes.
A Still from Ralph Fiennes (1995)
A Still from Ralph Fiennes (1995)
My use of found footage miniaturizes and compresses the cinema in favor for the net’s accessibility and ease. The finished video is uploaded online, where it can be viewed at 1080 HD resolution on a bright LED monitor in the comfort of your home as you shop Amazon for Prada sunglasses. We have previously quoted the French
director Alain Robbe Grillet, but we have found in your work references to Alberto Grifi's cinema too. Apart from these films, can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work? I started working with video as an MFA candidate and primarily looked at video artists that used found footage, like Michael Robinson
Though both of Grillet and Grifi’s work are influences that circulate throughout my own work, I find myself increasingly interested in big budget Hollywood blockbusters, as well as directors and artists who willingly cross into the commercial market. A few years ago, I visited the N°5 Culture Chanel exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, which was a sort of retrospective of the brand’s modern advertisement campaigns. The black box housed in the exhibition played key commercials throughout the brand’s modern history, including Ridley Scott’s directorial helm of their ’80 and ’84 television commercials. Scott’s take on the commercials is not just interesting to me for their stunning direction, but also because of his own willingness to “sell-out” for something as superficial as a perfume advertisement. I appreciate when an artist can sincerely endorse products without irony or cynicism and cross the boundaries into the commercial realm. David Lynch’s commercials for Calvin Klein’s Obsession in the late 80, and Jonathan Glazer’s commercial for Nike’s 2014 World Cup campaign are also successful examples of this exchange between highbrow cinema and commercialism. I’m tired of seeing the old left hypocritically represented in the art world by artists who profit by pointing at all the problems plaguing the world. Rather, I’d prefer artists sincerely represent the hyper-capitalist society we live in by producing work about Adidas, Rolex, Samsung and the brands we encounter and desire on and offline. What is the role of the trobing green screen?
and Gretchen Bender. At the same time, I was also heavily invested in the curation of my artwork and online identity, shaping my practice around my online environment. Studying the work of artists and writers like Hito Steryl, Ryan Trecartin, Simon Denny, and Jon Rafman helped shape the visual aesthetic of my video, and influenced the source material for my body of work.
As an element of production, it is a direct reference to digital media and post-production, referencing the rendering process in software like Final Cut Pro an Adobe Premiere Pro. In Ralph Fiennes (1995), the strobing green screen acts as a transitory state between the apocalyptic climate of the impending millennium and the future virtual landscape to come. It is a buffer between the realms, providing the profit Ralph Fiennes with rapturous visions of a new reality, always in between production in a never-ending state of rendering. Personally, I see the green screen as a tool of
progress that allows us to weave “real life” within the virtual landscape. It liberates us from the constructs of reality or daily life and places real individuals or objects in an “artificial” environment, as used in typical blockbuster films like The Avengers or The Hobbit. With the popularization of digital media over the past 10-15 years, the green screen has become a rather banal fixture of not only the cinematic experience, but also amateur video (ex. YouTube channels, Apple Photobooth, Adobe AfterEffects and Photoshop). As the populace becomes more engaged with digital video and the more banal the green screen and highresolution codecs become, the less profound our physical world appears. Everything is brighter on an LED retina display, and with the seamless quality of the green screen today, digital video truly is now more mimetically beautiful than IRL. The natural world simply pales in comparison to the 4k resolution of a Samsung smart TV. In these last years we have seen that the frontier between Video Art and Cinema is growing more and more vague: Ralph Fiennes 1995 seems to confirm this trend. Do you think that this "frontier" will exist longer? There seems to be a mutual exchange of mechanisms between cinema and video happening at the moment. Obviously, it’s become increasingly easy to create cinematic films with the help of digital media with little cost or effort. Though as a result of digital media’s popularity and the simplicity of online distribution, cinema has begun to mimic video. Direct examples of this are Cloverfield (2008), Chronicle (2012), and most famously The Blair Witch Project (1999), whose POV style is a direct reference to the medium of video. Though my work makes direct references to cinematic films, I’m not concerned with the cinematic experience or its history. I am, however, very interested in the miniaturization of the cinematic experience, and the culture of online streaming and file sharing. Online streaming allows me to stay at home, undressed, and comfortable for a more intimate experience in front of my laptop. It’s not that the romantic cinematic experience is dead (there will always be a cinema); it just isn’t convenient.
A Still from Ralph Fiennes (1995)
There are more video artists that are a part of my generation, who were born in the 90s and grew up with the emergence of the internet, that are more interested in the language of the net than the language of cinema. My art practice is dictated by the convenience of my online experience: what I torrent from The Pirate Bay, what I buy from Amazon, and the curation of my art and identity on social networks like Facebook,
Tumblr, and Instagram. It has less to do with the directors I follow or the films I watch at the cinema. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Chris. What's next for you? Have you a particular film project in mind? I recently completed a series of videos that act as companion videos to Ralph Fiennes (1995). The
last video of the series A Crown for Every Achievement treats economic ideology as product placement, alternating between quotes of Marx and corporate slogans. I’m also currently working on a collaborative installation with Stephanie Kang called, Life In The Woods, which loosely depicts Thoreau’s Walden as a digital search for enlightenment.