ARCHIVE - Thorsten Fleisch

smijed07 — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 00:53:34 -0800

Thorsten Fleisch is an experimental media artist from Germany, who has produced some very interesting work in the realm of animation, experimental imaging, and generative audio-visual / mathematical media. I reccomend Gestalt and Energie!. I also reccomend that you visit the FleischArchive, and check out some of the really amazing old animation that is present there.

ARCHIVE - Peter Rose - Updated with Interview Response

smijed07 — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:58:40 -0700

Peter Rose is a rather prolific media artist who has been producing work since 1968. His education is distinctive for a an artist working in the realm of film and video. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics from the City College of New York in 1967, and then continued his studies in film at the San Francisco State College in 1968. Since that time he has produced more than thirty films, tapes, performances, and installations.

His work is primarily of an experimental nature, being informed by his previous studies of mathematics, and showing the influence of structuralist filmmakers. His earlier work interrogates concepts of the forms of space, time, light, and perception. Soon he became interested in language as a subject, and produced work experimenting with this idea in the forms of political satire, concrete texts, performance, and witty intellectual comedy. More recently, he has returned to subject matter of landscape, time, and vision in the mediums of experimental video art and installation.

Though Peter Rose's work doesn't coincide greatly in style with my own project that I am working on during Fall Quarter, I am very interested in his work. I am curious to hear his thoughts about how his previous studies of mathematics has affected his work as an experimental media artist, and about his exploration of language as subject matter. His experimentation with the segmentation of the frame into multiple channels, which seems to be a recurring theme in his work, is also very interesting. Many of his projects seem to delicately navigate a dichotomy in how his projects convey ideas to an audience. On one hand, there is the clear communicating of ideas to the audience, with clear communication being the intent. On the other hand, there are projects where the meaning is not concretely evident in the piece, and a viewer has to put some of themselves into it in order to get something out of it. I am very interested in this dynamic, and the necessary aspects of successful, conceptual, and compelling works of media art that fall into the latter category. In addition to the previous topics of interrogation, I would be interested in asking the following questions:

How were you affected by your studies in graduate school? Do you think this experience was important or even critical in your current profession and/or conceptual abilities regarding media?
Can you describe your creative process? I am very compelled by your film Pneumenon, and the process by which it came into existence. Perhaps you could expand slightly into the differences between working in the mediums of video and installation, in your experience.
I am intrigued by your usage of multiple channels in many of your media projects, especially in Odysseus in Ithaca, Rotary Almanac, The Geosophist’s Tears, and Metalogue. Perhaps you could expand upon your intentions behind this stylistic approach.
I have noticed a distinction in your work between projects that contain semantic content, like verbal language, and those which do not. I would be very interested to hear your ideas about the differences between purely visual language and filmic language that contains language, either in speech or text form, and the differing affects this has upon the viewer's interpretation of a piece. It seems like this idea of how a viewer interprets or experiences a work of media is an of focus of much of your work.
How has the technological aspects of working in the audiovisual medium affected your creative work? Do you think the mediums you work in (i.e., film, analogue video, digital video) affect the form, content, or process you go through in creation of projects?
What are your thoughts on newly evolving forms of media distribution? I discovered your work by searching the Internet for media artists like yourself, and stumbling onto your website. 15 years ago, it would have been very unlikely that I would have even heard about you at all, let alone be able to see a significant portion of your work during the course of an evening. How do you see this affecting the future of media arts, especially with regard to the increasing ubiquity of free online video hosting services such as YouTube.com?

If you have any other things you are curious about regarding this media artist and professor of media arts, I would love to hear them in comment form.

(edit - 2006-11-06): Here is Peter Rose's response to the questions.

From: Esorp@aol.com <Esorp@aol.com>

To: dlibat@gmail.com

Date: Nov 6, 2006 9:43 AM

Subject: Re: Questions from a Media Student

Some freely associative answers to your very thoughtful questions:

Graduate School: I attended San Francisco State University in Film after getting an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from CCNY in NYC. I had been turned on to film by attending Slavko Vorkapich's lectures on the Kineaesthetics of Film at MOMA in 1965 and realized that film offered a way to make abstract structures more tangible than they were in math. I had been studying algebraic topology and had trouble understanding what it was that I was proving..... Unfortunately SFSU at that time was pretty conservative (although Scott Bartlett was on the scene and was fascinating) and I didn't feel much support for the kind of work I was interested in making, so I dropped out, never receiving a master's. My education in film was quite haphazard- I happened to know people who were into music, Brakhage's name was in the air, Warhol, etc. were in their prime, I was in NYC at the right time, and I landed a job teaching film (on the basis only of having made Incantation) where I learned about Frampton, Gehr, etc. So graduate school didn't play much of a role in my maturation and I am, indeed, suspicious about the role that theory, which is much of what they teach in graduate school, plays in truly creative work. See "Pressures of the Text".
There are a number of other filmmakers who have come from mathematics or whose work has a mathematical dimension: James Benning comes to mind- he was a mathematician; there is a Dutch filmmaker who made a wonderful film called "The Sea That Thinks" that is about a kind of mathematical perception; Snow, Frampton, Vasulka, etc. all have a mathematical dimension to their work. I just presented work at a symposium on HIgher Dimensions and their relation to Art and Science where I met a woman named Linda Henderson who wrote a serious book on the impact of the fourth dimension on early 20th century art and it could be argued that some experimental work fits into this tradition (Belson certainly.) Certainly Metalogue, Geosophist's Tears, Pneumenon, Odysseus in Ithaca, and Rotary Almanac can be seen in this way. But then there is also the work about language which seems to come out of some other domain, although it could be argued that I'm playing with language as a patterning system and that that too has a mathematical resonance.
My creative process takes one of two forms. I have a rigorous structural idea, a kind of question about what something might look like if you played by certain rules and I go out and shoot something that will permit that structure to work and you see what happens. The triptypch in The man who, the eclipse section, Analogies, all my multiple image work, Secondary Currents, etc. all come out of this predetermining approach.
Then there is a much more intuitive process that starts from a fascination with certain subjects and certain images, leads me to shoot them with no idea of what they might be used for, and then later something is suggested by them that is in the nature of a poem or a visual spectacle. The Darkening, Omen, the Prologue to The man who, the Golden Gate Bridge, Pneumenon, Odysseus, Geosophist's Tears, and others arose in this fashion.
My interest in multiple images arose, actually, from a vision seen on an acid trip in 1965 in which I saw a Japanese couple making balletic love in 100 time-staggered images and I realized that you could use film to see time from another perspective. So it's not so much a matter of style as it is a desire to see in a new way. And that's what animates much of the work. Some involve seeing time in some accumulative fashion; others present a kind of kinetic binocular vision that provides us with a chance to see another kind of space, to see in another dimension.
Language: as I indicated above I think there is a structural dimension to the way I play with language and this links it to the visual structural play in the other work. ( I could go into a whole rap about the role language has played in adjudicating what is considered "good" in visual art and about the demerits of the curatorial system, but...) I started by seeing Language as the enemy. I thought all images should be purely visual, following Vorkapich, but came to see language as another kind of image, another kind of sound, and to see that as long as you didn't take it too much at face value you could assimilate it into an intelligent film. : voice-overs in invented languages, writing on the surface of the film, exploding letters, transmogrified gestures- all could be fair game in a visual quest. Some of these films try to teach the audience the rules of a certain game and to show how one could play with these rules: Secondary Currents, SpiritMatters, etc. A kind of algorithmic motivation to the work.
The technological question is an important one. We have, now, to ugrade our tools every couple of years; are in thrall to software engineers and computer companies; have to constantly transfer works in older media to newer media; know that everything we are making will probably be unreadable or unplayable in 50 years, at the longest; all of which is horrific. And yet the facility with which I can play with structures that would have been impossible with film and optical printers- the complexity of form that is now possible- this is impressive. It is all a bargain with the devil. Even though film has greater resolution I got into video because a) it was vastly cheapter b) permitted more complex work with sound and had much better sound reproduction and c) because there is a radiance to the light coming from a monitor that is not quite the case with a film image.
The Internet did indeed promise us the ability to do an end run around the curator system, bypassing the gatekeepers and making the work available to whoever might take an interest. But we make no money off of the work- at least I don't- and there is so much stupid stuff out there, so little apparent taste for anything challenging that one wonders how anybody would ever find you. (I'm quite flabbergasted, actually, that you found me that way. What were your keywords?) I have seen some good stuff, mind you, but the net festivals and venues that I've visited all seem to like pretty lowbrow work. Nevertheless the idea of making work for the internet, rather than converting older film and video work to net compatible formats, is worthwhile, but I haven't yet gotten into it, preferring to make work that has some more substantial scale and impact, that heads into video installation territory. This is difficult because unless you are Bill Viola or Gary Hill or under 30 you won't get into a gallery and there will be no way "distribute" the work. A problem.
Almost all of my projects have been funded by a large number of grants, fellowships, etc. supplemented by screenings, lectures, workshops, etc. I have not been happy about this, feeling that the whole premise of the fellowship/grant system was that eventually you'd start making money from your work and you would have been launched, as it were. I have received a few commissions to make documents on public art work (which were actually much fun and well received) and some commissions from a few museums, but I've never been free of the need to find some kind of public/philanthropic funding. But, too, I've never felt that the funding affected the content or form of the work. ("Babel"is quite political, but the funding scene then was quite liberal and I had no difficulties.) In retrospect I think there are two kinds of dangers in funding: too little time and too much pressure to make something meaningful on demand. This leads to thin work. Too much time and too little pressure: this leads to endless finagling and indecisiveness. Best situation for me is a fellowship which gives me general support and which doesn't oblige me to produce anything in particular.
From your e-mail it appears that you've only seen the work on the web- you should understand that most of these are excerpts Should it be useful you could- send me a list of the works you'd like to see for personal use- I can make a DVD pretty easily now; have Evergreen purchase a complete collection of the work; or have Evergreen invite me out sometime. I've done many, many lectures on my work and they have always been incredibly well received. (The last time I was in Washington was for a disastrous show to an audience of six at an ill-organized underground screening, so I'd love to have the occasion to form a better impression of the northwest.) Check out my website for a list of previous venues.
I found your questions quite sharp and would be happy to elaborate should that prove useful.

regards Peter

ARCHIVE - Student Originated Studies: Media - Artist Profiles

ARCHIVE - Thorsten Fleisch

ARCHIVE - Peter Rose - Updated with Interview Response