Elegy in the Turbine Hall

I was sad to realize while in London in September that I was narrowly missing two shows at Tate Modern: an impressive looking Gerhard Richter survey, and Tacita Dean's commission for the Turbine Hall. Dean's work opened last night to a chorus of reviews, with lots more undoubtedly to come. I'll keep an ongoing roster of interesting commentary at the end of this post.

The piece is called FILM. It's a striking installation of poetic cinema: a jewel-toned, silent, 11 minute film presented as a monumental projection onto a 13 meter screen nestled toward the back of the Turbine Hall. The projection system uses 35mm film and a cinemascope lens turned around at 90 degrees to achieve the very unusual vertical format. And it contains no digital post-production － all the visualizations, superimpositions, and image combinations are made with "analog" methods: during production, inside a 16mm camera, and with splices on a Steenbeck editing machine.

That would be because the piece is a strong polemic for the material of film, and a claim for the differences between celluloid and digital. Tacita Dean talks about celluloid film as her medium here and here, likening it to oil paint. She wrote an impassioned manifesto for it earlier this year, and in the exhibition's accompanying catalog surveys 80 cinematic artists about this question of filmic obsolescence. "Pitched against this," she writes － 'this' being the film industry's absolute turn to the digital in recent years － "art is voiceless and insignificant." You don't have to be sympathetic to this point of view to still hear in it a Shakespearean question －"How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?" In a sensitive documentary, produced by the Tate to contextualize the show, Dean describes the intensity of her commitment to this medium around a question of intimacy:

Film and digital are just different mediums. They're very intrinsically different: they're made differently, they're seen differently. Film is my medium, just as oil is the medium of painters. I need the time of film for my work, and the atmosphere of film.

Anticipating the end of celluloid is like waiting for a tsunami to arrive. A lot will change when the wave finally hits, and there have been plenty of indicators of its encroaching already － practically for a generation. But we're probably near the crucial moment now, which adds a certain pathos to this work. The last lab in Britain that would process 16mm film closed during the production of Dean's FILM, and inexperience in the Dutch lab that was able to process it resulted in some major errors.

The material medium of celluloid film has remained essentially unchanged since cinema was invented in the nineteenth century. I think this is partly why its passing away is experienced so emotionally, as an enormous loss, by cinephilic aficionados. But the analog/digital debate can easily devolve into a retrograde fight, which is why I think it matters that Dean claims that her stance isn't absolutist but aimed at demanding ongoing choice between the two:

that analogue film might be allowed to remain an option for those who want it, and for the ascendency of one not to have to mean the extinguishing of the other.

I'd be curious to hear from people who are able to actually see the piece since my sense of it is, of course, digitally mediated.

Reviews, Tacita Dean, FILM, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 11 October 2011–11 March 2012
(in chronological order, more or less):

e-flux, press release
Background interview at Phaidon Press
In the artist's voice, the making of: a lovely process documentary from the Tate

Sylvie Lin, The Disappearance of Film－An Interview with Philippe-Alain Michaud (Art Taipei Forum)

Adrian Searle, The Guardian
Emily Eakin, New Yorker
Sarah Kent, The Arts Desk
Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman
GertiesGirl, Inscape (blog) 
Jackie Wullschlager, The Financial Times
Charles Darwent, The Independent
Alison Roberts, This Is London
Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Royal Academy of Arts Magazine
Cate Smierciak, Berlin Art Link
Sally O'Reilly, Art Review

And the last word, perhaps, to the curator Nicholas Cullinan:

In reading about Dean’s filmic works, which document edifices either derelict (Bubble House and Palast) or belonging to another era (Boots and Fernsehturm), or sitters captured towards the end of their life, a word that is all too often used to describe them is ‘nostalgia’. This characterisation of Dean’s films gives me pause. It strikes me as wrong, or at least reductive and misleading. Dean’s works have thus far tended to be written about in terms of ruins, remnants and obsolescence, and while those words may be applied to some of the subjects captured by her camera, the images within her films, and in FILM particularly, are not fragmented or entropic, but instead alive and vital. They are images which very much seem to be making a case for why they should, why they must, be preserved in order to go on existing. And this difference between my account of Dean’s work and those of others hinges upon a simple perception.

Where some see fossilisation in the subjects captured by her camera’s lens, I see revivification, every time the projector is switched on and these images are summoned back to life once more. If film is a medium that seemingly lacks a physical presence or substance, and is instead one which flickers and fades phantasmagorically before us and then persists largely in the memory, then this immateriality is echoed in Dean’s films, capturing that which is fugitive or fleeting – light changing, places or people before they vanish, time passing. Those who see only nostalgia in her films miss the point, because what I see in Dean’s work, and in FILM in particular, is wonderment at what can be salvaged by the camera’s lens. 

Image credits: Ian Nicholson / PA; Sarah Lee for The Guardian; Ray Tang/Rex Features, all from The Guardian; video from the Visit London Blog

Why you’re not dead - surviving in a world of enemies

I hate to break it to you, but I’m afraid you have a potentially life-threatening disease; in fact you have quite a few. Aren’t you fortunate that you have the most sophisticated protection system ever devised fighting to keep you healthy? If I took away your immune system right now you most likely would not live to read my next post. What would kill you would be the everyday bacteria, viruses and fungi that are, quite literally, on everything you touch, eat, drink or breathe, and are trying to use up the precious resource that is your body as your read this now. Luckily for you, I’m not going to take your defences away, but I will try and give you a deeper understanding and appreciation of this incredible system and what we know about how it works.

The innate immune system - stone-age defences

Broadly speaking, the mammalian immune system is split into two branches: innate and adaptive. The innate immune system is what’s left over from earlier stages in our evolution and is basically a way of making ourselves a tough place for pathogens to survive. This is done in a number of ways of varying sophistication. One simple mechanism is inflammation at an area of infection. In inflammation, innate immune cells (a branch of white blood cells known as non-lymphocytic leukocytes) such as macrophages or dendritic cells detect fragments of pathogens that are common for many species, things like components of the bacterial cell wall  or particles of viral DNA. This detection is achieved by receptors present at the surface and in the interior of these cells that have developed alongside pathogens throughout our evolutionary history and so are well-tuned to detect them. The activation of these receptors by pathogenic components causes the cells to release a whole host of pro-inflammatory molecules - one well-known example is histamine, which causes vasodilation and hence inflammation, and is why you will have probably taken anti-histamines if you suffer from allergies.

Total Perspective Vortex

[I apologise to all readers of the blog who also take the time to read the comments because you have probably already have seen the following videos. For those who don't read the comments, you're missing out on half of the purpose of the blog.]

Michelle asked in this post what role cinema plays in science. I think this is an interesting question and a smart choice of post from Michelle. Opening a dialogue between science and art isn't easy. We speak very different languages. We sometimes tackle similar questions, but we do the tackling in very different ways. Moving images though are something that exist in both worlds. They may be used very differently, but that's the interesting thing; how are they used differently? How are they used similarly? There are tools such as sculpture and advanced mathematics that probably aren't used in both worlds, but moving images are.

So moving images are a great example for this blog because they give us that first piece of common ground from which to begin a conversation. 

My first contributions to Michelle's questions were the following two films. They are the best examples I know of that properly show how insignificant the Earth is. Watch them in high definition.

The first film, above, is a film of the dark matter particles in the Millenium Simulation. This is what we expect the universe should look like if we could see the dark matter in it. As stated in the wikipedia link, each individual particle in this simulation (i.e. pinprick of light in the film) has a mass one billion times the mass of the sun. Not only that, but the total volume of the simulation is much less than the total volume of the observed universe. Keep that in perspective when watching... this video shows only a small fraction of the total volume of the universe and each dot in the video is much bigger than an entire galaxy! (don't forget that one galaxy will itself be 100,000 light years wide - this is so big that in one human lifetime light could only travel 0.1% of its width - and that is just one galaxy, something just big enough [edited from the original - "not big enough"] to be seen in this video.)

The film above is the real world equivalent. This film shows the locations of individual galaxies in the observed universe as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. SDSS has only mapped a fraction of the sky and can only see galaxies that are within a certain distance of us. So you see less of the universe, but at a finer resolution. In each galaxy in this video there will be billions and billions of stars just like our sun. This website helps if you find it hard to visualise what the number one billion actually means.

As the conversation develops I will hopefully find time to explain the scientific gains from both SDSS and the Millenium Simulation as well as what a scientist gains from watching the films themselves. But for now, let's just treat these as eye candy for the weekend as we wait for James' next proper post, due to arrive on Monday.

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Congratulations Cosmology

The news today had an almost poetic structure to it, as if it was part of a well crafted story.

Firstly, for all those rock dwellers out there, the Nobel Prize in physics, announced today, went to two groups who, in 1998, turned the world of cosmology upside down. Their discovery subsequently planted a great big question mark in the rest of the world of fundamental physics, for it was the observations made by today's Nobel prize winners that caused the entry into the standard cosmological model of that most mysterious of concepts:

Dark Energy

The observation these groups made is all the more beautiful for how mundane it actually is. They simply made the observation that a bunch of distant supernovae were dimmer than had previously been expected. But, still today, nobody has any good idea what causes this dimming. Subsequent cosmological observations have made it clear that the dimness of these supernovae probably means the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but why? And if it isn't accelerating, what profound property of our universe is so cleverly mimicking this acceleration.

This was great news for cosmology and if the fact that observations of exploding stars can completely change our understanding of the make up of the universe wasn't poetic enough, today also happened to be the day that ESA announced its next wave of big experiments. One of these was Euclid (artist's impression below). The confirmation of Euclid's eventual launch is also great news for cosmology. On the same day that one beautiful cosmological experiment wins the most prestigious prize available to a scientist, another beautiful cosmological experiment is announced.

What is ESA's stated goal for Euclid? Nothing else but:

To understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter by accurate measurement of the accelerated expansion of the Universe through different independent methods.

And so, while today the big news headlines were of the Nobel Prize being awarded to the two groups who pointed out an enormous cosmological mystery, it is not outside the realm of possibility that hiding subtly in the news background the experiment that will solve this mystery was also today finally made a certainty.

You couldn't write a better script if you tried.

An artist's impression of the Euclid satellite

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Games are art.

[Note from Shaun: The following is a guest post from Barnabas Soon. Barnabas and I went to school together and often used to discuss whether computer games could be considered art. Barnabas has always thought yes, he is also the first person to give into my "will you write a guest post for us" harassment. Thank you Barnabas. Enjoy.]

What is Art?

According to Google's definition, art is defined as:

"The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power."

Following this definition, for me, works of art, be they painting, sculpture, drawings, literature or film are a medium in which the creator is also trying to convey a message, reveal something interesting, create a visual impact or create an emotional impact.

Are video games art? 

A video game is also a medium in which the creator is trying to convey a message or create an emotional impact. If art is a creation that makes you think, imagine or feel, then just as film, literature and TV can be art, games can be art.

In the same way that film and comics have evolved, changed and eventually gained acceptance in mainstream society as art; video games are now following this same trajectory. They have evolved from merely being simplistic simulations to something much greater. They have evolved into an experience.

Unlike the passive mediums of books and film, games are an interactive medium. They are dramas that require audience participation. If you don’t make choices, the game will never continue, the story will never unfold. Your character will remain there passive, or worse, die. This interaction, and the mental, psychological and emotional commitment required by the player sets games apart from other mediums. It is also because games can reproduce the same feelings that other forms of art can elicit that numerous games can be considered ‘art’. The experience of a video game is multimedia. Sound, graphics, interface and interaction with the game world and feedback of your actions all come together to create the experience.

Like any other medium, there will be good games and bad games and others that are downright weird. Your enjoyment of video games will depend a great deal on your personality. Strategy games like Simcity which simulate running a city are video games which wouldn't probably be classified as 'art', but are still fun and interesting in their own right and can often teach us valuable lessons about life.

Computer games, science and Foldit

Next Monday we will be having our first ever guest post (I know, I know, exciting right?). In anticipation of this great event and because it is loosely related I thought I would mention the following piece of incredible innovation humanity has shown. 

Foldit, is a computer game designed by Seattle based biochemist, David Baker. In the game the player twists and contorts a virtual protein molecule to try to guess its correct, or most efficient, shape. The game itself seems to be quite popular, at least for a small independent game of this nature.

Now ordinarily a game like this might be a quaint example of a clever scientist coming up with an innovative way to make his research more popular and understandable. However, this is not actually the primary aim of Foldit at all. The aim of Foldit is to use the insight and cleverness of the gamers to advance the science itself.

This sounds like a ridiculous idea, but as you can see in the video below, it turns out that the Foldit experiment isn't doing so badly.

And, as explained in this article at Nature News Blog, at an annual competition, intended for biochemists to predict the shapes of proteins, a team of Foldit players did surprisingly well. In fact, they made a genuine scientific discovery. From the article:

Foldit’s biggest success so far came after CASP9 [the annual competition], on an enzyme produced by a retrovirus called Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV). A player who goes by the name 'mimi' came up with a shape that would be accurate enough to serve as the basis for determining the real shape of the protein based on X-ray diffraction measurements

"The M-PMV structure had stumped scientists for a very long time before Foldit players made their breakthrough. This is the first example I know of game players solving a long-standing scientific problem," Baker wrote in an email.

You can find the game itself here.

How is this related to the upcoming guest post? Hah, you'll have to come back next Monday if you want to know the answer to that. In the meantime, don't forget to read the comments and join in with the discussion relating to Michelle's post below.

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Moving images, everywhere

A few years ago the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris opened a large public exhibition titled Le Mouvement des images (The Movement of Images) -- information and images here. The Centre Pompidou is France’s National Museum of Modern Art, covering both the 20th and 21st centuries, and it boasts one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of film and moving image art.

Le Mouvement des images was based on a straightforward but quite radical premise: that the art of the 20th century should be re-read through the cinema experience. What this implied was a reconsideration of assumptions about the relation of art and technology to include not just film and photography, but also the traditionally plastic arts: painting, sculpture, drawing. In short, the exhibition was “a redefinition of the cinematographic experience widened to include all the visual arts.”

The strength of the Pompidu’s collection meant that the exhibition’s curator Philippe-Alain Michaud had an opportunity rarely available to curators and academics - he was able to work directly from the museum’s holdings to literally re-organize the canon of modern art relative to the idea that the filmic and ‘static’ arts both reflect a technological influence. For example, in relation to series of drawings made by Picasso several minutes apart in 1970, the artist is quoted as observing “It’s the movement of the painting that interests me, the dramatic effort from one vision to the next.” Taking a dynamic principal like movement as subject tends to alter the painting’s emphasis from fixity to flux.

I mention Le Mouvement des images because it seems a good example of a perspective from within the arts relevant to the interdisciplinary interests of this blog. In part, this is because Michaud understands film to be something far more pervasive than Hollywood blockbusters: he defines ‘cinema’ in a way that includes the moving images that are a ubiquitous part of our daily life, including those on the internet, on iPhones, webcams, and in scientific laboratories.

Part of my interest in the specific art/science crossover comes out of the observation that moving images are an increasingly integral, even methodological component of contemporary scientific research. Some of my current reading on the topic goes so far as to suggest that filmic tools like live-cell imaging are changing biology by introducing a dynamic imaging process into the heart of the scientific method. In that vein, it is probably not a coincidence that a couple of Shaun and James’ recent posts have involved links to films - of animation by stop-motion, by cell structures, and by particles.

So if it seems viable to revise the history of Modern art from the point of view of dynamic images, can we extend that perspective to science? I’m curious about the perspective on film as a research tool from the other side of the art/science equation.

Image credit: Gerhard Richter, Halfmannshof (1968), Offset print on lightweight cardboard. Based on a photograph taken by the artist from a moving train.