revision COMPLETE scheduled for publication
Jessica Fenlon
Jessica Fenlon untitled video still
[ intimate distance ] Take the data file that is a digitized 16mm American stag film from the
1960's. Alter the data in that file by altering the motion-‐tracking information, a technique known as 'datamoshing'.
"Moshing" the data interrupts our gaze; the nakedness revealed in her strip veiled by data decay and digital hallucination. [ intimate distance ] The left brain, language-‐centered, breaks things down into small pieces. Discrete parts are assigned meaning; sequential presentation provides story. The right brain, concerned with the whole image, considers meaning in terms of all the information provided. Parts are viewed in relation to whole; taking in an image all at once, a story may or may not arrive. The digital breakage in peep shifts the image to the categorized, gridded, sequential space. It reveals the digital language carrying the human image. And then the film shifts; it dances with us. The girl dances, the cameraman gazes. The datamosh creates its own dance with our perceptual faculties. Right brain or left, recognizable or not, how do we find her skin? Surfaces dissolve behind the surface of the screen. The nude no longer descends the staircase in one still. She dances, she moves; in this medium, I hand her the veil, the veil video wears so well. [ intimate distance ] Audio samples of a broader, imagined outdoor space. Snippets of English evoke created and revealed illusions. peep (2013) : codec altered found video, with sound
The stag film puts the viewer in the original cameraman's place, intimate distance from the stripping woman.
[ intimate distance ]
Jessica Fenlon Chicago, IL
An interview with
Jessica Fenlon How did you come up with the idea for [ peep ]? A feminist sex toy shop was planning a burlesque party and the owners asked me to project video with the dancers. I made STAG, a 90 minute reel of digitized 16mm stag films from the 50’s and 60s. I found most of the footage at archive.org. This was in 2007. I was in Pittsburgh, it was a year before I started deconstructing video by altering the compression structure, or datamoshing. I consider online media libraries a collective pseudo-conscious. Each collection’s a sub- jective crapshoot of content; institutions and individuals upload media related to their priorities. Lists of links to video files represent hours-months-years of footage. This ever-shifting public repository lives alongside our ‘entertainment consciousness’. Entertainment media ~ televised content, films screened in movie theaters, what’s being Netflixed ~ has an active profile in the public consciousness. Entertainment media is ‘new’, is discussed, critiqued, remixed on the internet, reviewed, etc. In contrast, pseudo conscious material is publicly stored. It becomes a kind of latency activated only by curious users, people trying to remember particular aspects of pop cul- ture, and artists. Who else wants a gander at all the Family Circle magazines published in 1983? In Pittsburgh, the people at the party talked about the playfulness of the stag reels, their innocence. I thought about the male gaze, the intimacy of each film. At the time, nothing more came of it.
Jessica Fenlon
In 2013, digging thorough my archives looking for something else, I found the STAG files. I remembered the intimacy of the source material. Browsing through them, I was drawn to the personality projected by the stripper. I wondered, what would happen if I moshed this? How would data loss impact the gaze? As I started working I knew I was on to something. More than 50 years have passed since the International Situationist pamphlet by Debord: the manipulation of mainstream moving-images had a remarkable politi- cal aim for the French philosopher, while nowadays artists seem to be attracted by found footage manipulation in order to explore deep psychological issues, whether the foot
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age has a "private" source (super8 home movies) or not (frag- ments from mainstream films). In your work, you success in mixing these two as- pects, creating a sort of "micropolitics of desire". Thank you, I appreciate that insight. Could you explain our readership did you get in touch with the datamosh- ing method you use in [ peep ]? In 2007 I saw Takeshi Murata’s Monster Movie at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Fascinated by the mutilated images, I connected the seeping colors to the act of painting. The results also revealed some of the data mechanics of digital video;
I’ve al- ways enjoyed working with media in a structurally-revelatory way. More importantly, semi-legible images pointed to rich potential for a semiotic/unravelled narrative content. Instead of creating a verbal deconstruction of the video through text, I could work with decayed images created by this process. This decay picks at the au- thority of the source image, allowing the viewer permission to loosen image references and more actively project meaning or narrative into the images on screen. When I returned to Pittsburgh, I asked the Internet, “datamosh how-to?” A few youtube tutorials later, I was exploring the crashiest approach to video animation ever.
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We have found the analogies with the left and right brain really interesting, they remind us of Gilles Deleuze's famous statement The Brain is the Screen. Could you introduce our readers to this fundamental aspect of your work? Poet e.e.cummings refers to "the eye within the eye”, the conscious self relating to the body’s instruments of sight. Rudolf Arnheim, gestalt analyst, film theorist, and author of Visual Thinking, paradigmatically influenced my understanding of viewer experience. Arnheim mapped how viewer's skill at interpreting optical experience evolves over time through personal interrogation of that experience. I’ve been a teacher since 2001; I’ve taught studio art,
museum education and computer training. I used Arnheim’s Socratic tutoring approach to support my students’ visual literacy, and observed my students’ growth in literacy over time. My left-right brain description is an enormous generalization, one in play in popular cul- ture. It was a preliminary sort of large groups of people; as a schematic opposition, it generally is the first orientation that an instructor can make when assessing how a stu- dent processes information. People develop certain habits of looking at the world, they establish these habits very young. Paths of recognition become ingrained over a lifetime of habits; they fall to one side (2D-linear-language) or the other
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(whole/gestalt); those approaches to reading in- formation are inverse or contrary. Why did I use this generalization? It’s a convenience. It's easier to introduce the simplified underlying approaches to information than to attempt to describe the dizzying com- plexity of subjective human perception and information management that I’ve worked with over the years. I would love to read a conversation between Deleuze and Arnheim. How deeply would Deleuze’s rejection of a psychological approach to moving image perception rub up against Arnheim’s ‘conscious operant development’ theory? Per the direct question: as I understand it, Deleuze’s statement "the brain is the screen” describes the brain’s
interaction with image as a resonance with physical, biological structures. This is pretty amazing, when you think about it. He discards psychological approaches to perception, arguing instead for a machine-like, unconscious engagement with images. I’m tuned in to the viewer’s conscious psychological partnership with their senses; Deleuze rejects this approach. I’m fascinated by his idea, which reads as a possession state on the viewer’s part. What about the digital object’s system of interior projection? The display, instead of the screen? I’d love to ask Deleuze what he thinks about how the equipment displaying moving image has changed. Today’s monitors and screens display visual information
projected on their interiors. These screens compete with all sorts of other information in the visual field, depending on where the person is using their computer or tablet. Speak- ing of tablets, what about mobile devices? They were not on the market at the time of Deleuze’s death. . . . Your art is rich of references. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work? As you read this answer, please consider these lines from Deleuze ~ “There is no work that doesn’t have its beginning or end in other art forms”, and, “All work is inserted in a system of relays”. Growing up, my mother took me to see art in museums regularly. I loved O’Keefe, Kahlo, Rothko, Gorky, Jacob Lawrence, the cubists, Klee, the surrealists, Varo, Cornell, Naumann, Merz, on and on. Every museum trip meant discovering more work. My parents weren’t afraid of letting me see dangerous art. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party and Birth Project, Mapplethorpe’s explicit photographs, Serrano’s Piss Christ, I saw these in person as a kid and teenager in the 80’s. We talked about what it meant. Not just the work itself, but what it meant to live in a culture that was suspect of unique, pri- vate meaning outside of the (white, male, conservative) mainstream. What it meant to have competing histories. All of this art was normal and accepted, in my world. Sometimes I read the wall text, mostly I ignored art history, at least until art school demanded I learn those created hier- archies. I lived with my experiences of the work. I have eidetic memory, something like photographic memory. My brain keeps a reference catalog of artwork I’ve experienced available on demand. Since it is created by my personal viewing history, It’s a subjective catalogue. My filing system is both personal and referenced against art history. Working with digital media allows me to work in many media. I enjoy honoring images and ideas that I have struggled to under
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stand at various moments in my personal growth as a maker. I knew I was on to something when I was making [ peep ] when a sudden enriched perception of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase arrived during the making process. The opposition between blacks and white seems to be not only an aesthetic choice due to the original 16mm film you have used, it highlights the dualistic na- ture of your work: camera/girl, analog/digital, left brain/right brain. Could you comment it? I would use the word and instead of or! And refers to the dynamic that emerges from each pairing. Left and right brain, in
video player to calculate motion, to keep col- or-shape images congruent as time passes and other movement happens in the frames the betweens are altered. Could you take us through your creative process when starting a new project? I am drawn to an image or an idea that recurs in my writing (I am also a poet). If motifs like teeth, pills, paper clips, recur, I pull them in from other media, translate them across material, and play with them. Sometimes I draw or collage. The process of living with the images, making with them, other ideas emerge. What’s happening in our culture? What images can I pilfer from the collective pseudo conscious, alter, and feed back to it? In all of it, there is an attempt to discover/reveal meaning about where we are, what our participation with public memory/media tells us about ourselves. I feel like an alien in- specting American culture from the inside. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and time, Jessica. What’s next for Jessica Fenlon? Are there any new projects on the horizon? video, with sound
a viewer, assemble sensory information to discover- create meaning. Camera, cameraman and girl together created the source footage. How do black and white collapse into grey? The source footage may be black and white, but digitizations leaked color into the work. On a data manipulation level, I enjoy breaking open forms so shapes leak or become fog. The image slips in and out of recognition. The camera is between the cameraman and the girl. The computer screen is between the viewer and the footage. The part of the video file that is altered during the creative process are the part that allows the digital
Always! Other image-based, datamoshed works evolve in my studio practice. I’ve been working with a vocabulary of images from known films, found objects, drawings, teasing out animations. This summer, I’ve been creating audio-responsive video using Processing, working on music videos for Christian Kriegeskotte’s original classical piano pieces. I’m also work- ing with the Chicago band »radiant devices«, producing visuals for their performances using Processing and Quartz Composer. Since late 2012 I have been developing a larger body of work exploring what I call the American Church of the Gun. The preliminary work has been entirely digital, but there may be a shift to physical objects and paintings. We’ll see! Jessica Fenlon