Victor Burgin ‘The noise of the Marketplace”

During the more recent history of cinema, less self-consciously resistant practices have emerged in the new demotic space that has opened between the motion picture palace and consumer video technologies. Few people outside the film industry have had the experience of ‘freezing’ a frame of acetate film, or of running a film in reverse – much less of cutting into the film to alter the sequence of images. The arrival of the domestic video cassette recorder, and the distribution of industrially produced films on videotape, put the material substrate of the narrative into the hands of the audience.

Film studies must now confront as heterogeneous an ‘object’ as that which confounds photography and television studies – in fact it is largely the same object. In the final paragraph of his comprehensive review of a half-century of film theory, Francesco Casetti writes:

‘For a long time cinema has not been identified with one kind of film: it is a fictional full length movie, but also an experimental work, an amateur's 8-millimeter production, an

Since the pre-modern period, a range of modes of exhibition attempted to control the chaos and rationalize a society. However, in today’s landscape of art and technology, the very media that tried to control became part of the chaos themselves in the “intermedia network.” This phenomenon is visible in the proliferating forms of screens – of cinema, television, street advertisements, computer, and mobile devices – that surround, and are simultaneously activated by, contemporary subjects. Thus, the contemporary subjects are becoming less and less connected to each other in local communities and are, instead, increasingly involved in virtual communities, through media and technologies. Today’s “commercialized public space,” as pointed out by Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, lacks social exchange; the exterior “social” spaces are evacuated of activities and discourses, failing to house Jürgen Habermas’ utopian notion of the culture-debating public. Rather, by engaging in the mediated space globally, the subject stretches the intimacy of personal communications over longer and ever-more complex pathways; the contemporary subject has become increasingly vulnerable, fragmented, and disconnected.
These isolated individuals are then encouraged to escape to institutionalized interiors, such as museums, that provide spaces in which to activate meaning-full social exchange and induce specific readings of that exchange. According to Rosalyn Deutsche, “museums provide actual spaces and cerebral fodder for exploring art, personal values, social issues, and civic responsibilities.” Museums, or institutionally commissioned projects such as Community Cinema, thus posit a shelter, or more precisely, a frame to contain chaos and fragmented individuals. By impelling relational activities, the mediated interior of exhibitions is a reminder of the dissolving social spaces of the exterior world. These new practices allow social exchanges to happen. The legibility within the mediated space of installation is a displacement of what the individual is lacking in the social world outside.
i.          Viewing Positions
In an interview, the production manager describes the community’s experience of Tiravanija’s installation as characterized by “disbelief at what was going to happen,” and after the deconstruction of the ephemeral set, “[disbelief] that it had ever occurred.” The installation stages an illusion for the community residents; they witness moving images unravel on the temporary make-shift facades of the city. Apart from the projection screens, the installation architecture is an invisible one, ephemeral walls elevated to intervene in the ordinary progression of life. Within the barricade of the community, the residents experience what the prisoners watched in the Platonic cave. The intersection is transformed temporarily into an outdoor movie theater, a cave of light and shadow that exhibits itself outward.
Through its location and mode of projection and reception, Community Cinema situates itself at the intersection of the private and the public. The project materializes Habermas’ concept of the dissolution of the private sphere through its installation of four-channel screens in the middle of the community road. The installation is placed in a residential neighborhood; the intersection serves as a private area for the community residents.  Habermas remarks that “the loss of the private sphere and of ensured access to the public sphere” characterizes today’s urban mode of dwelling and living. By situating the installation in the middle of an urban setting, the artist attempts to insert the filmic dialogues amidst a cacophony of “competing visual stimuli.” “Technological and economic developments have quietly adapted the old forms of urban dwelling to new functions.” Apparatuses such as screens that disrupt private space play an important role in defining installation as a machine for the realignment of urban topography. This installation expands from its purely architectural framework to become social architecture, a visual infrastructure of the community.
Community Cinema exudes nostalgia for the compulsive temporality of public projection. The four-screened films are a set of Hollywood films, deriving from the collective survey: A Bug’s Life, Casablanca, The Jungle Book, and It’s a Wonderful Life. These selected films represent the community; more specifically, the survey functions as part of cultural display. Both It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Casablanca (1942) were produced in the 1940s, examples of American romantic drama film. The Jungle Book, an animated film produced by Walt Disney, was produced in 1967. A Bug’s Life (1998), a CGI animated film by Pixar, was released only a year before the installation in 1999. As usual, Tiravanija employs films less as an experimental strategy than as an apparatus of mass-entertainment that reveals both social and cultural meanings. 

ii.               Community Intersection as Mediated Stage
The embodied and empowered viewer performs on the mediated stage of the installation. While Community Cinema makes nostalgic returns to classical diegesis, the filmic projection is contextualized in the form of an “art event.” The project spectacularized the cinema viewing experience by inserting large-scale projected images into a three dimensional space within which the viewer could wander at will. In this space of fragmented illusion, the mobile visitor receives an illusionary impression of space by focusing on objects that move toward or away from him. The architectural matrix of the installation differs from a two-dimensional painting in that the depth is recognized through a bodily experience, instead of presumed only in the imagination.

b. Image
The ensemble of images becomes an affective abstraction. The abstract image created by the panorama of four screens represents what Deleuze calls the affection-image. Departing from Sergei Einstein’s definition that “the affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face […],” Deleuze proposes an affection image that is neither a close up nor a face, but nonetheless gives an affective reading of the film. Such an image is “a reflecting and reflected unity.” It is pulled and defined by two poles in reflecting surface and intensive micro-movements. In the case of an image of a clock in close-up, on the one hand, the image has a face as “receptive immobile surface, receptive plate of inscription, impassive suspense,” thus reflecting movements. On the other hand, the clock has its needle-hands moved by micro-movements. The needle’s motion forms part of an intensive series that marks an ascent towards a critical instant, or what Deleuze adds as “paroxysm,” an outburst of emotion. A series of micro-movements on an immobilized plate of nerve defines the face. The combination of a reflecting, immobile unity and intensive expressive movements constitute the affect.
According to Deleuze’s logic, the abstract spectacle in the community intersection constitutes these two poles: reflecting surface and intensive micro-movements. The choice of the films projected on the four screens together symbolizes a face, both metaphorically and in the Deleuzian sense.  The choice of the films represents the cultural and social construction of the community. The physical framework of the temporary theatre, four screens held up on a vertical structure, follows the analogy of the face: “the face is the organ-carrying plate of nerves which has sacrificed most of its global mobility and which gathers or expresses in a free way all kinds of tiny local movements which the rest of the body usually keeps hidden.” The temporary theatre in the installation, a collection of four screens, serves as a face that is fixed in the middle of the urban intersection. An immobile material structure itself, the four screens show four selected films, which represent “tiny local movements,” the cultural tendencies and inclinations of the community, which is not revealed except through an open survey. The outdoor theatre is treated as a face: it has been ‘envisaged’ or rather ‘faceified.’ “Even if it does not resemble a face,” it stares at the community residents, who are then dévisagé, or de-faceified.
Because this occasion provokes questions that concern the basic premises of democracy, the viewer reflects. This process of questioning corresponds to mental reflection, the process by which one recognizes the potential issues at stake. Therefore, the viewing experience is double-sided. Deleuze writes, “We are before a reflexive or reflecting face as long as the features remain grouped under the domination of a thought, which is fixed or terrible, but immutable and without becoming, in a way eternal.” The viewers are situated before this monumental temporary outdoor theatre, made up of multiple senses. The ensemble of components becomes abstract through its multiplicity. The theatre-spectacle as a whole assembles these disparate features in abstraction and fluidity. Abstraction functions as a dominant strategy, without imposing any ‘thought’ that is becoming. The thought of community is conveyed as fixed and immutable, and yet it remains fluid through the abstract form of projection and exhibition. It allows for a passage through which one can traverse like a nomad, moving through the confusion of waves of sounds, images, odors, and chatter, “in a way eternal.”

Postproduction

But if images start pouring across screens and invading subject and object matter, the major and quite overlooked consequence is that reality now widely consists of images; or rather, of things, constellations, and processes formerly evident as images. This means one cannot understand reality without understanding cinema, photography, 3D modeling, animation, or other forms of moving or still image. The world is imbued with the shrapnel of former images, as well as images edited, photoshopped, cobbled together from spam and scrap. Reality itself is postproduced and scripted, affect rendered as after-effect. Far from being opposites across an unbridgeable chasm, image and world are in many cases just versions of each other.¹⁴They are not equivalents however, but deficient, excessive, and uneven in relation to each other. And the gap between them gives way to speculation and intense anxiety.

Under these conditions, production morphs into postproduction, meaning the world can be understood but also altered by its tools. The tools of postproduction: editing, color correction, filtering, cutting, and so on are not aimed at achieving representation. They have become means of creation, not only of images but also of the world in their wake. One possible reason: with digital proliferation of all sorts of imagery, suddenly too much world became available. The map, to use the well-known fable by Borges, has not only become equal to the world, but exceeds it by far.¹⁵ A vast quantity of images covers the surface of the world—very in the case of aerial imaging—in a confusing stack of layers. The map explodes on a material territory, which is increasingly fragmented and also gets entangled with it: in one instance, Google Maps cartography led to near military conflict.¹⁶

While Borges wagered that the map might wither away, Baudrillard speculated that on the contrary, reality was disintegrating.¹⁷ In fact, both proliferate and confuse one another: on handheld devices, at checkpoints, and in between edits. Map and territory reach into one another to realize strokes on trackpads as theme parks or apartheid architecture. Image layers get stuck as geological strata while SWAT teams patrol Amazon shopping carts. The point is that no one can deal with this. This extensive and exhausting mess needs to be edited down in real time: filtered, scanned, sorted, and selected—into so many Wikipedia versions, into layered, libidinal, logistical, lopsided geographies.

This assigns a new role to image production, and in consequence also to people who deal with it. Image workers now deal directly in a world made of images, and can do so much faster than previously possible. But production has also become mixed up with circulation to the point of being indistinguishable. The factory/studio/tumblr blur with online shopping, oligarch collections, realty branding, and surveillance architecture. Today’s workplace could turn out to be a rogue algorithm commandeering your hard drive, eyeballs, and dreams. And tomorrow you might have to disco all the way to insanity.

As the web spills over into a different dimension, image production moves way beyond the confines of specialized fields. It becomes mass postproduction in an age of crowd creativity. Today, almost everyone is an artist. We are pitching, phishing, spamming, chain-liking or mansplaining. We are twitching, tweeting, and toasting as some form of solo relational art, high on dual processing and a smartphone flat rate. Image circulation today works by pimping pixels in orbit via strategic sharing of wacky, neo-tribal, and mostly US-American content. Improbable objects, celebrity cat GIFs, and a jumble of unseen anonymous images proliferate and waft through human bodies via Wi-Fi. One could perhaps think of the results as a new and vital form of folk art, that is if one is prepared to completely overhaul one’s definition of folk as well as art. A new form of storytelling using emojis and tweeted rape threats is both creating and tearing apart communities loosely linked by shared attention deficit.