Reset the Apparatus

Reset the Apparatus An artistic research project based at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. RESET THE APPARATUS!

Retrograde Technicity in Artistic Photographic and Cinematic Practices is an artistic research project funded by the Program for Arts-Based Research (PEEK) of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project is based at the Media Theory Department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The project duration is from March 2016 until February 2019. Obsolete photographic and cinematic technologies are

becoming more and more present in artistic practices, as well as in popular culture, often blurring boundaries between the two. It is especially the “improper” use of film stock, cameras, projectors, and other photographic and cinematic software and hardware that brings to light the vast creative potential of outmoded media. This return to obsolete media is not a rejection of the contemporary or a nostalgic turn to the past, but instead fulfills a critical function. It questions the notion of linear progress and challenges the idea of an “appropriate” distance of the body to the apparatus – which is to be understood not only as a technological artifact, but also as a set-up or “dispositive”. The arts-based research project RESET THE APPARATUS!, with its trans-disciplinary, international team of artists and scholars, explores the phenomenon of retrograde technicity by merging artistic and theoretical approaches that will not only bring about new ways of understanding of the photographic and the cinematic, but also of our relation to media both old and new.

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Wien
1030

Allgemeine Information

PROJECT TEAM Edgar Lissel (project leader) Nina Jukić (key researcher) Gabriele Jutz (key researcher)

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RESET THE APPARATUS! A Survey of the Photographic and the Filmic in Contemporary Art gathered together film and photography artists and theorists in the hope that together we might come up with a different take on contemporary photographic and filmic practices based on opto-mechanics and/or photo-chemistry—that is, supposedly “obsolete” analog film and photography. Photography and film have more in common than what is frequently cited as what differentiates them, namely, the difference between stillness and movement. Both, for example, were regarded as “new” technologies during the nineteenth century and—at their respective beginnings—were greeted with suspicion as artistic media. Moreover, photography and film shared the same technological base. At the present moment their very existence is under threat due to the proliferation of digital technologies and media convergence. Not to forget, analog photography and film are technological singularities that allow for immediate intelligibility by the user (whereas the digital requires transcoding). This has far-reaching consequences, such as the impact of technological change on the human body and its modes of sensation.

Our enquiry focused on artistic methods and processes that make clear reference to the material and technological conditions of the photographic and/or filmic and, at the same time, open to an “expanded field” of practice. The terms “photographic” (instead of “photography”) and “filmic” (instead of “film”) no longer adhere to the respective mediums’ technological implementations as we know them, rather they appeal to the concept underlying photographic and filmic practices. As the project’s emphasis is placed on deviant uses of media, photography and film are not only addressed as media but also as apparatuses or dispositifs, a perspective that broadens the scope and facilitates examination in terms of their operational use. Equally important was to foreground the process of production, as opposed to that of reception alone, which is the main issue in traditional apparatus theory. In order to understand the working procedures underlying a respective artwork, a renewed focus on the history of technics and technology also became necessary.

Far from romanticizing the pre-digital/analog past, RESET THE APPARATUS! asserts a critical engagement with the conventional apparatus, and reflects the rich potential that can result from artistic practices that modify, repurpose, or even dismantle their own apparatus. The photographic and filmic, as the site of innumerable productive contaminations, not only expand our common notion of photography and film; they also generate insights into the contingent nature of their apparatuses and provoke new forms of artistic production. In the light of today’s indulgence in digital media, the return to allegedly outdated media and their apparatuses manifests as a resolute resistance to the norm, thereby fulfilling a critical function, too.