Immersed in the Single Channel: Experimental Media from Theater to Gallery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Steve Reinke's Anal Masturbation and Object Loss (Video) (2002), we encounter the artist preparing a book for the library in the art school he plans to start. A shot of his hands busy with a glue stick pairs with a rumination on contemporary art in Reinke's unmistakable, disarming tone. He explains that video projections in galleries function mainly as placeholders, you know - they say something like, 'Watch this space for a while until something of interest, urn, can conceivably appear They want to hold our attention without taking up any space - any physical, architectural space, you know - or any cognitive space either. The chapter of the book he's gluing together (so you won't have to worry about reading it) will give its title to a series of artworks: the book-object on a plinth, Anal Masturbation and Object Loss (Sculpture); this video; and an maybe like a mirror installation in a corner, with a projection of a slow pan of flowers in late bloom, almost abstract : Anal Masturbation and Object Loss (Phceholder). I will be arguing that experimental media art was doing just fine. There's still lots of wonderful experimental film and video around that is linear, or to use a video term, single-channel .. Lots of great work that deserves our attention and hence, our love - to paraphrase Andre Bazin. There's nothing wrong with it. However, many media artists are now making their work with the gallery in mind. The institutional venues for single-channel experimental media are shifting from the festival/distributor circuit to gallery/museum circuit, primarily for economic reasons. Thus many artists seem to feel forced to make work for installation, whether that inclination is aesthetically necessary or not. I argue that the current artworld climate has made aesthetic concerns secondary to financial ones. Further, I disagree with notions that installation is more material or critical than theatrical screening; however, aesthetic issues of interest do arise with regard to attention, distraction, and what I'll call cognitive consumerism. Before going on, let me give a definition of experimental media. It includes films and videos that experiment formally with the medium, from film formats to low-end video formats to HD to mobile and online platforms. It includes experiments, drawn from critique of cinema and TV, with sound, montage, structure, reflexivity, etc. It experiments with the relationship between fiction and documentary: presence, index, performance. Indeed some of the richest experimentation now seems to work with performativity: cinema as an event, from framing to reception. Experimentation also regards content: experimental narrative, essay films, experimental documentary, certain political work. A negative definition: it's whatever doesn't fit into standards for commercially viable fiction and documentary; it's any short that isn't a calling-card film. I'll focus solely on single-channel work, not multiple-screen or interactive work. THE FINANCIAL SITUATION Experimental media artists are producing more work at the same time that paying venues are diminishing. Facing the decision of where their work is best placed, in the movie theater or in the gallery, they ask: Where will my work be best received? What will be the quantity and quality of audience? Will I be paid, and if so, how much? If they take the theater route, their work will likely appear as a single projection in a darkened room, in festivals and one-off screenings. Most experimental films do not fit the commercial standards of the film festival circuit, but there are excellent festivals and series that are dedicated to experimental work, such as Ann Arbor; Images in Toronto; Views from the AvantGarde at the New York Film Festival; Rotterdam; Kino Arsenale in Berlin; Oberhausen. Many experimental festivals have closed down in recent years.1 Still, most cities have a couple of modest venues for showing artists' cinema, with small but ardent audiences. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".