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ISSN 1755-0866 | Online

Issue 11 | Dec 2010

X 24 Jason Dee

Publisher:

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Text and images, 2009 © artists, writers and Horsecross Arts Ltd

Threshold artspace launched in September 2005 in Perth, UK. It is home to Scotland’s only permanent collection of contemporary media art with 80 works acquired over 3 years. The artspace covers a number of project spaces available for artists’ interventions including an entrance box for interactive soundscapes; a ‘canvas’ of 22 flat screens dominating the artspace for multi-channel video art installations; an interactive playground for art games and live internet art; a trail of sound boxes and sensors embedded in the floor and ceiling;an audio visual treat in the public toilets; copper-clad roof for light artists. All Threshold artspace locations are linked together by ‘intelligent’ software which allows artworks to be displayed through curated exhibitions and experienced 24 hours a day throughout the year.

Horsecross is an independent arts agency delivering cultural, conference and community activity in Perth Concert Hall and Perth Theatre. Located within the foyer of Perth Concert Hall Threshold artspace sits on the site of the original Horsecross, Perth’s 17th century horse market. The name is synonymous with bustling activity in the heart of the city. The development of the £19.5m Perth Concert Hall and Threshold artspace was a Millennium project and is part of the area’s economic development strategy to position Perth as one of Europe’s most vibrant small cities by 2010.

Horsecross aims to put this part of central Scotland firmly on the cultural map both nationally and internationally.

artspace

The essay Dee Time by John Calcutt was commissioned and published on the occasion of the commissioning, production and acquisition of Jason Dee’s work x24 (2008) for the Horsecross Arts permanent collection of contemporary art and its world premiere in December 2008 as part of Behind the Stag, Between the Scenes group exhibition at Threshold artspace curated by Iliyana Nedkova.

X24 (2008) by Jason Dee was produced by the artist, curator and Horsecross Arts for Threshold artspace in partnership with 55degrees, Glasgow. Supported by Scottish Arts Council New Work Fund.

ISSN 1755-0866 | Online

Life doesn’t get any better than in the movies: reality often pales by comparison. In fact, the whole history of mainstream cinema might be thought of in terms of the moving image’s increasing capacity to mimic lived experience, even to outstrip and displace it. Fluent movement, synchronised sound, rich colours: these are among the technical achievements of film that have allowed it to conjure compelling illusions that now constitute an independent reality, a reality parallel to that experienced in the material world, but qualitatively different from it. Increasingly, it seems, the real world is experienced through film, rather than vice versa. Thus the filmic experience of a place one has never visited (Los Angeles, for example) prepares one in advance: the ‘real’ Los Angeles merely confirms its filmic representation. But there is nothing inevitable about any of this. Rather than following the path of illusion, the history of film might have taken another route. The determining factor, however, was money. This is, admittedly, the crude reduction of a complex cultural phenomenon to an improbably singular cause, but a basic truth remains: in order to prosper, the film industry needed a product that would sell, and its particular brand of conventionalised realism proved to be a winning formula. It was especially seductive in so far as it did not appear to rely upon specialised codes and conventions; it could be easily ‘read’, and consumed in a relatively passive and distracted manner. It seemed to flow naturally with the current of life, rather than battle upstream against it. Audiences liked it: they loved it.

Unsurprisingly, there were those who were suspicious of mainstream cinema’s seductive charms. These dissenters believed that the illusions peddled by Hollywood were politically regressive, and that populist movies lulled the masses into a false sense of reality. The function of film, they maintained, should be to dissect reality, to reveal its contradictions and inequalities, and to awaken the audience’s sense of injustice and indignation, rather than encouraging them to invest their fantasies in the falsities of a cynically engineered status quo. The illusionistic techniques of mainstream movies had to be ‘defamiliarized’ if this politically liberating effect was to be released. The artistic avant-garde thus inaugurated a counter-movement, its film makers advocating an alternative set of techniques and strategies, embracing montage editing and non-narrative structures, for example. To counter illusionism they offered materialism, constructing films from scratched and distressed celluloid, from found footage, or – to achieve similar physiological results - by using stroboscopic effects. They did not want to transport the audience into a realm of fantasy; they wanted to assault the audience, to annoy them, to bore them, to make them feel painfully aware of their bodies as they endured these seemingly endless minutes of optical (and sonic) onslaught. Nor did they feel that the audience should be spared knowledge and awareness of the mechanical apparatus that allowed the filmic spectacle to happen. Consequently, film projectors might be placed centre stage to receive the same attention as a sculptural object, and their whirring, clicking and ticking became the film’s soundtrack.

Jason Dee’s films belong to this alternative tradition of avant-garde film making with its concern for a critique of all those techniques, tricks and conventions that make mainstream cinema such a powerful cultural force. Dee, however, differs in his approach from those outlined briefly above. This difference lies chiefly in terms of Dee’s relation to those films that inspire his own work. Whereas previous generations of critical avant-garde film makers (who might be called modernist, for the sake of convenience) had taken an oppositional stance against mainstream cinema, Dee works with it. Whereas the earlier artists would deny or contradict their target, Dee explores it, producing an alternative version by teasing out what already lies as a possible fault line or contradiction within his object of study. His work might therefore be thought of as broadly deconstructive

in that the means for a critique of mainstream cinema are not to be found in some alternative, external discourse, but are actually located within the films themselves. They carry within them, as it were, the seeds of their own potential contradiction. Through careful examination and thoughtful reflection, Dee manages to effect shifts within the grammar and vocabulary of mainstream cinema, thereby allowing it to release new meanings and new significance from within itself.

Such an approach did not develop overnight, of course, and some of Dee’s earliest works show how he first began to articulate and refine his method. The films produced between 1997 and 2003 (Drag, Mirror, Flip, the Street/Studio videos) are all relatively short works made to be displayed on a monitor, and all examine the various relations between sight, sound and movement within the moving image. Chronologically, however, they are preceded by Tape, a work of 1997-98. Originally exhibited in boxes, Tape comprises stereoscopic images and headphones to create, in Dee’s words, “a form of immersive 'virtual reality', made from of obsolete technologies containing scraps of collective and individual memories”. The various elements of this work – photographic documentation of discarded audio tape; audio playback of actual sounds found on the photographed tape – thus serve to reaffirm each other in a self-reflexive manner. Two systems of information storage (medium format photographs; magnetic recording tape) interact and exchange data. But this work is as much about loss and decay as it is about capture and preservation. Beyond the mutually reinforcing facts with which the work deals, its psychological dimension speaks of isolation, abjection and forgetting. The sounds on the audio tape are often stretched and strangulated, chewed by an audio cassette player (hence the tape’s abandonment: it no longer works ‘properly’), and these discarded piles of magnetic ribbon make a sorry sight, blending pathetically with dog shit on the pavement. And what has been preserved is that which has been forgotten.

Dee Time John Calcutt

This latter aspect of the work inevitably introduces the dimension of time into the equation. We are tempted to construct an imaginary narrative around each of these sound-image combinations: Who was the owner of the tape? What significance did the sound on the tape - a song by Bob Dylan in one instance - have for the owner (songs in particular have a great capacity to function as mnemonic triggers, reminding us involuntarily of events, people, relationships and other assorted moments, pleasant or otherwise)? Would the loss of the tape also be the loss of a memory? Why did the dumped tape end up in this particular spot? Finally, perhaps, this cast-off detritus does not register solely on a connotative level, evoking thoughts of loss, absence and rejection, but it also draws our attention to its more literal, practical and material aspects. When watching the images or listening to the sounds generated by our technological equipment (film, television, video, vinyl, audio cassette, CD, DVD, etc.), we want that equipment to be self-effacing. In order to do its job properly, it must itself remain invisible and inaudible. If the celluloid or vinyl is scratched, we become easily distracted by the resulting interference; if the tape in the video or audio cassette get snarled or otherwise distorted, we immediately reject this as unwanted disturbance. For Dee, on the other hand, the foregrounding of the mechanisms of illusion within the technologies of reproduction (film, in particular) becomes an area of particular interest.

In Drag (2001), for instance, the film opens with a white screen. Suddenly, a blue line flicks into view and stretches, snake-like, across the field of vision. The line then becomes taut, straight, and, a moment later, we hear a scratching sound. The action and the sound are repeated a few seconds later. We can see something, and we can hear something, but we are not sure what either of them might be. The work’s title helps us to understand that we are watching and listening to something being dragged. Eventually, after several repetitions of pull-scratch action, we see what it is that is being pulled: a microphone. The effect of the apparent tautology involved here (it seems as if it is the microphone that is producing the sounds that it is transmitting) is both surprising and – in common with many of Dee’s other works – witty. Unlike those self-referential works produced by artists of earlier generations (such as Robert Morris’s Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making, 1961), Dee’s films are invariably characterised by a gentle emotion occurring somewhere within the range between humour and pathos. As the microphone is tugged across the screen we see that it has something tied to it that it is dragging into view. This, it turns out, is a flat sheet of black painted plywood. It is this sheet, lying parallel to the picture plane (the screen), that we now learn is the source of the sound. Gradually, after two or three more tugs, the black sheet occupies the full screen, and the film, which had opened with a white screen, now closes on black.

Microphones and recorded sound also feature centrally in other works by Dee from this period: the Street/Studio videos (1999/2000); Mirror (2001); Flip (2003). In the Street/Studio videos, for example, Dee concentrates upon the techniques of the Foley artist. These are two-screen works in which the left hand screen displays an everyday scene, such as people walking along a street and entering a building, and the right hand screen displays the Foley artist recording the accompanying sound effects, such as footsteps and the opening and closing of a door. The overall impact of each of these videos is slightly disorienting in so far as it is almost impossible to focus one’s attention on either of the screens. The task of the Foley artist is, paradoxically, to emphasise the acoustic naturalism of a scene by the use of various contrived techniques (most famously, perhaps, the sound of horses’ hooves is achieved by tapping coconut shells together). In Dee’s videos, however, it is the artificiality of the process that is foregrounded at the expense of naturalistic illusion. This is largely a consequence of the fact that we are invited to see that which, under normal conditions of film production, is intended only to be heard. Through such inversion illusion is dispelled, and viewing becomes a process of comparative analysis (checking one screen against the other), rather than a passive reception of the already synthesised.

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Flip presents yet another wonderfully condensed and concise analysis of film. The video begins silently as we witness someone’s hand starting to riffle the pages of a flick-book. Already we sense that these rapidly flickering pages offer an analogy to the sequential frames of a movie. The image that is animated by the afterimage effect created by the flick-book’s cascading pages is equivalent to a zoom-in on a microphone attached to a stand. As this microphone appears to advance ever closer, so the sound of the flicking pages emerges from silence and begins to increase. The circuit of self-referentiality that Dee constructs in Flip is not only elegant and witty, it also enacts a pithy critical analysis of film. Yet again the viewer is encouraged to enjoy the doubt that may be experienced as sound and movement are dissected and ‘flipped’.

In 2004 Dee’s work began to take on a new dimension. In films such as We’ll Revisit the Scenes of Our Youth (2004), I Wish There Could Be An Invention (2004), Her Celluloid Self (2005), And The Band Played On (2005), That’s All (2005), and We’re Going For A Trip Across The Water (2006) the artist uses footage from mainstream movies as his raw material. In this respect his working method parallels that of many other contemporary artists, such as Douglas Gordon, Christian Marclay, Tracey Moffat, Jonathan Horowitz and Dara Birnbaum. The common interest here is in exploring the extraordinary power of popular culture to construct shared meaning and value within the social realm. More specifically, the interest is in attempting to reconstruct such meaning and value, to coax these highly persuasive media representations into releasing different sets of meanings and values. In Dee’s case, this process of reprogramming is dependent upon a series of technical strategies whereby filmic time is radically modified, being either arrested and slowed, or subjected to a seemingly endless circularity.

Several of these films (such as, We’ll Revisit the Scenes of Our Youth, That’s All, and We’re Going For A Trip Across The Water) exploit a double screen format in order to fracture time and spatialize it. Not only is the ‘interior’ time of the original film dismantled (two separate, temporally sequential scenes from the original film are now shown simultaneously), but the viewing experience is also ‘divided’ (in the case of We’re Going For A Trip Across The Water, the two scenes are projected onto opposing sides of the same projection screen, making it impossible to view both at the same time). Our immersion in the narrative flow of the original movie is thus thwarted, and we are never allowed the psychological satisfaction provided by narrative resolution. The denial of this satisfaction is, however, the denial of an illusion, for narrative resolution – the dénouement, the climax, the happy ending – provides only a false sense of life’s structure. Life itself is characterised less by neatly defined beginnings and endings than by interminable, inconsequential ebbs and flows. Narrative resolution, in other words, is a fictive device offering a kind of symbolic compensation for life’s structural arbitrariness.

The predominant mode of temporal development within mainstream movies is linear: filmic time progresses in an orderly fashion from the opening to the closing scenes (although flashbacks may occasionally interrupt such sequence, they do not fundamentally undermine it). In Dee’s works, on the other hand, time is circular, rather than linear. Such circularity is manifest not only in the technical aspects of the work (the films are short loops, endlessly repeating themselves), but is also restated metaphorically in their imagery. A carousel spins and spins in And The Band Played On; the landscape behind the occupants in an open top car (I Wish There Could Be An Invention) does not recede into the distance, but rotates without end; the rowing boat in We’re Going For A Trip Across The Water will never reach the shore as it circles upon itself; a bicycle-powered contraption scrolls a scenic backdrop (We’ll Revisit the Scenes of Our Youth); a reel to reel tape recorder is spooled back and forth (That’s All). Several interpretative possibilities result from this looping of time in Dee’s work.

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First, we might be prompted to think of the relation between time and agency in these films. In his reflections upon cinema, Gilles Deleuze distinguished between movement-image and time-image as the two dominant modes of temporality within film. Movement-image is the characteristic mode of mainstream cinema, and it is identifiable as an illusion of time that is driven by the actions of the onscreen characters (time is determined by and structured around their actions): time in movement-image is thus subordinate to the needs of narrative development. By contrast, time-image focuses attention upon the passage of time in its own right. Here, the relation between time and protagonist is reconstituted, with time no longer being merely the support for the unfolding of a character-driven narrative, characters perhaps even being imprisoned by time. Time within the time-image may be purely durational: repetitive, uneventful, unmodulated (Andy Warhol’s Empire providing an extreme example). In Dee’s films the temporal structure of the original Hollywood movie has been rebuilt, converting it from movement-image to time-image. Time no longer helps the actors to complete their actions: on the contrary, they are forever stranded in an eternally locked time-loop in which repetition blocks the path to resolution.

In contrast to the playful wittiness of his earlier work, the mood of these later films by Dee is somewhat darker and melancholy. This slightly mournful mood is further enhanced by their relation to another aspect of temporality – historical time. This aspect is most readily apparent in the fact that the majority of these films are black and white, a technical feature long since superceded by the virtually ubiquitous use of colour film stock since the 1950s. By means of the black and white image we understand immediately that we are dealing with the past, with a time that is lost, a world that has disappeared. The actors that we see suspended in an infinitely repetitive ‘present’ within the confines of filmic time are now, in fact, dead. And in their death they occupy another time zone, one equally beyond the demands of temporal development. These films, then, invite us yet again to contemplate loss.

This loss is not, however, simply the inevitable loss of life, it is also the loss of the past, the loss of history. Any such loss entails trauma, and there are two principle psychological mechanisms that prepare us to respond to this shock. In mourning we acknowledge and accept the loss, pass through the associated trauma, and readjust to life in the aftermath of this loss. If, however, we refuse to acknowledge and accept the loss, if we cannot confront the trauma, we fall into melancholia and are condemned to a process of repetition whereby the lost object is constantly invoked and its loss denied. The combination of obsolescence (black and white film), mortality (actors now dead) and repetition (circularity) in this group of Dee’s films suggest a melancholic disposition towards loss. The dead must not die, they must remain in limbo: perhaps the couple in the rowing boat in We’re Going For A Trip Across The Water are on the river Styx – they have left the shores of life, yet they will never reach the shores of death.

But such melancholia is not to be understood as an aspect of Dee’s own personal psychology; it is better to understand it as a reflection upon a general cultural condition. As countless cultural commentators have observed over the last quarter of a century, the nations of the developed west have been steadily losing their sense of history. In one of the bleakest of such prognoses, Jean Baudrillard has claimed:

Post-modernity is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It is a game with the vestiges of what has been destroyed. This is why we are 'post' - history has stopped, one is in a kind of post-history which is without meaning. [...] We can no longer be said to progress. [...] Right now one can tumble into total hopelessness - all the definitions, everything, it's all been done. What can one do? What can one become? And post-modernity is the attempt...to reach a point where one can live with what is left. It is more a survival among the remnants than anything else.To bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that one has destroyed in joy and which one is reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive... All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces. Playing with the pieces - that is the post-modern.1

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Many theories have been offered to account for this phenomenon, and in the early 1980s Frederic Jameson proposed that the mass media – in their relentless pursuit of the new and the now - function “as the very agents and mechanisms of our historical amnesia.”2 Thus movies – as one of the principal forces within the mass media – bear a responsibility for our loss of history, gradually eroding the line between fact and fiction, replacing real time with reel time. It is both appropriate and incisive, then, that Dee should revisit the history of film in order to explore film’s undoing of history.

Within this same body of work the question of time is explored by Dee in other, equally vivid, ways. Most notable is his use of the frozen image – or, more exactly, his partial freezing of the image; his creation of a hybrid image composed of both still and moving elements. A couple sit motionless across from each other in a train compartment, as if they were in a still photograph, rather than a movie, yet wisps of smoke drifts from the man’s cigarette and a painted mountain landscape rolls past the carriage window (We’ll Revisit the Scenes of Our Youth). Immobile as statues, another couple watch a movie being projected, their lifelessness contrasting eerily with the flickering light emanating from the movie projector and the swirling cloud of smoke caught in its beam (Her Celluloid Self). There is, on a psychological level, something uncanny about these images, if the uncanny is to be understood as manifest in those moments of undecidability when that which should be animate appears as inanimate, and that which should be inanimate appears as animate (Freud cites the automaton as a potential source of uncanny sensations).

Remaining in the realm of psychoanalysis – or, at least, exploiting its terminology – we might also benefit here from considering Walter Benjamin's idea of the optical unconscious ("Small History of Photography", 1931). In this essay Benjamin noted; "It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis." Photography, Benjamin points out, allows us to see details that the eye would otherwise be ‘unconscious’ of. And in slow motion photography, for example, we find images that we would miss if viewing the action at normal speed with the naked eye. These visual phenomena offered by the camera, Benjamin suggested, might correspond to the way in which the unconscious registers and ‘records’ experiences that are unavailable to the conscious mind. Thus Dee’s techniques of ‘freezing’ and of radically slowing the moving image allow us to penetrate beyond the superficial impressions created by the illusion of real-time movement produced by the projection of movie images at a standard 24 frames per second.

As a result, film now becomes as much an object of scrutiny as a scene of fantasy. Consequently, our mode of attention also alters, shifting from more or less passive consumption to a kind of critical engagement. Our concern is less with what happens in the movie (narrative has been almost entirely eradicated), than with how the staging of cinematic illusion has been achieved (and cancelled). In this respect Dee is fascinated by another of film’s paradoxes: in order for the filmic illusion to function, film has to destroy its very foundation – the single frame. Only by ‘sacrificing’ itself to the greater totality can the individual frame contribute to the filmic effect; only thus can its ‘stillness’ be magically transformed into the illusion of movement. Stillness therefore operates as the repressed, ‘unconscious’ dimension of film, and to return film to its fundamental state of immobility is to exposeits uncomfortable secret.

In That’s All, Dee pushes this exploration yet further. To freeze a moving image in order to render it an object of scrutiny is one thing, but can the same process be applied to sound? Sound is, after all, equally subject to temporality, and equally subject to recording technology. Using footage from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Dee’s split-screen, colour film further investigates some of the questions surrounding the relation between sound and moving image that had occupied him in earlier work such as Tape, Drag and the Street/Studio films.

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On the upper screen, an anxious looking man (a crime suspect?) is being interviewed by police, who are also recording the interrogation on a reel-to-reel tape deck. Employing the same technique of image manipulation, Dee has frozen the suspect – hunched forward, mouth open, leaning towards a microphone - within an otherwise animated scene. On the lower screen we see a different man (the actor Gene Hackman) operating another, more sophisticated, reel-to-reel tape recorder: he plays a tape, stops it, rewinds it, plays it again, adjusts the volume, frequency, and mixer controls. He seems to be searching for some precise section of the tape that will contain the sound he is hunting: every time he plays the tape we hear the same sound of a fairly high pitched droning tone, an extended note whose frequency wobbles slightly, almost sounding like a swarm of flying insects.1

This sound, we are encouraged to believe, is the one that we see being recorded in the scene on the upper screen. The presumed source of the recorded sound is thus absolutely motionless, whereas the tape operator on the lower screen works frantically to find a point of rest, a ‘solution’ or an answer. The sound in That’s All ends up being elusive, enigmatic and inexplicable. We can only impute its origin (the suspect is inanimate and, presumably, incapable of producing vocal activity. Furthermore, the sound is perhaps only vaguely recognisable as human.) And yet, despite its meaninglessness (it has none of the articulation demanded by language) the tape operator – like the viewer of Dee’s film - is relentless in his pursuit of some signifying detail that might unlock the mystery. Rather than being simply diegetic, the sound element functions simultaneously in diegetic and non-diegetic modes (i.e. in its diegetic form on the lower screen – where the sound stops and starts in synchronisation with the playing of the tape recorder - it appears to arise from within the depicted event, while in its non-diegetic form on the upper screen it appears to arise from without, as if it were an added soundtrack). Despite all the visual evidence of its capture by recording device, it evades any precise location.

Recording, Dee seems to suggest, liberates events – visual and aural - from their normal spatio-temporal coordinates. In recontextualising these decontextualised events – that is to say, in recombining them into new hybrid configurations – film has, as was suggested earlier, the capacity to fabricate unlimited versions of reality. And in choosing to reconfigure existing films, Dee (along with other contemporary artists) further suggests that the nature of reality itself might be a spin-off effect of the ways in which reality is represented. In a fundamental twist to traditional understanding of such matters, the reality-effects to be found in art and other forms of representation are not to be judged by comparison to some independent, autonomous reality: on the contrary, reality is only knowable as a consequence of the ways in which it is produced within representations. The artist’s task therefore becomes one in which pre-existing representations become the ground on which to challenge conventional models of thought. Dee’s insight is in his recognition that, within the world of film, sound is as essential to this process as the visual image.

Running Time offers one of Dee’s most complete statements on many of the issues outlined above. This single screen film in panoramic, letter-box format appears to track, in a seamless rotating camera movement, the progress of a running man as he passes through a semi-industrial landscape. The film opens with a static shot: centre screen, a man is frozen in mid-stride as he runs across a desolate landscape with high rise buildings and cranes in the background. The image starts to move from right to left across the screen (it is not clear whether the image is sliding in front of a static camera, or whether the camera has begun to pan from left to right) leaving behind the image of the running man. At the same time, slurring into action after a standing start, the soundtrack commences – a repetitive, percussive orchestral score familiar from countless suspense scenes in innumerable mainstream movies.

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The pace of the panning camera and the sound track increase in tandem, and suddenly the camera catches up with the running man – who, unfrozen, is now actually running. He appears screen right, but the speed of the tracking camera is faster than him, and so he slips further back towards the left hand side of the wide screen. As he reaches the edge of the image and is about to disappear off-screen, the camera appears to relent and to slow down to his pace, enabling him to stay in shot. In fact, he now outpaces the camera and regains centre screen. This, however, is merely a temporary equilibrium. The camera movement speeds up, as does the soundtrack, and the running man disappears beyond the left hand edge of the frame. Panning rapidly across the landscape (we now realise that the camera is not tracking laterally but is situated at the hub of an encircling vista), the camera catches the runner again: it has ‘lapped’ him, and he is overtaken by the right hand edge of the frame. This game of cat and mouse, this knowing play between speed of running man, speed of camera movement and speed of soundtrack, between movement and immobility, between movement-image and time-image, between absence and presence (the running man is either in shot or out of shot) continues with variations until both the camera and the soundtrack grind to a halt, allowing the running man to ‘escape’.

We now have what amounts to a reversal of the opening shot: the camera appears to be frozen whilst the man continues his movement independently. Or, at least, this is what we are led to believe. The running man is out of shot, but we hear his running footsteps, which have taken over from the ‘frozen’ music as the soundtrack. We are asked to believe our ears, rather than our eyes, in order to imagine his continued running. The sound of his footsteps moves away towards the right, fades, and then becomes louder again as we seem to hear him approaching from the left. Sure enough, he now enters the screen from the left and runs across the static landscape shot. He is on his third such circuit when the camera and soundtrack crank into action again, swiftly gaining pace and toying with him once more. Gradually, he disappears altogether, and the camera and soundtrack wind down, as if waiting for him to catch up. Finally they ‘capture’ him again: as the camera slowly pans right we see the running man, frozen in his original position. Having returned to its starting point, the film ends its first loop, only to commence the same torment again and again.

Many of Dee’s leitmotifs appear in Running Time: spatial and temporal circularity, a disturbance in sound-image relations, a mutual undermining of movement-image and time-image, the use of pre-existent imagery (in this case the footage comes from Get Carter, 1971). But whereas previously Dee had manipulated the movement in the appropriated footage (freezing action), in Running Time he also manipulates space. The semi-industrial landscape through which the running man flees has been stitched together by Dee in Photoshop, using found imagery. It is an entirely artificial space, constructed from still images and animated by software. Thus to talk of the movement of the camera is, in fact, misleading. As with all his work since 2004, Dee did not use a camera in the making of Running Time. If the movie camera is instrumental in creating illusion within film, Dee has produced the illusion of camerawork – an illusion of an illusion.

A similar interest in the production of ‘virtual’ reality was already evident in Moonscape of 2006, a film produced by digitally stitching together painted backdrops from various 1950s sci-fi films into a continuous 360˚ panorama. This foray into sci-fi is unusual in Dee’s work, but not altogether surprising. On the one hand, the self-evidently fantastical nature of sci-fi makes it an appropriate genre for teasing out some of those ideas concerning reality and its representation, truth and fiction, actuality and virtuality. Furthermore, Dee’s choice of 1950s sci-fi imagery fits neatly with his interest in the interweaving of time, temporality and history in so far as such imagery arises from the past, addresses itself to the future, and offers itself for continual reinvention in the present.

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Dee’s most recent work at the time of this writing is X24 (2008), a Horsecross commission for the Threshold artspace in Perth. Originally conceived as a sculptural work comprising 24 monitors arranged in an inward facing circle, the installation of X24 in the Threshold artspace adapted this initial configuration in order to respond to the architectural context of the gallery. Arranged in a row at the forefront of the glazed oval building, the monitors are synchronised to display footage with a 1 frame delay to each adjacent monitor. Each short piece of footage comes from pre-existent sources (i.e. it is appropriated, readymade material) and features the moment when a photograph is being taken with flash lighting. The effect of the flash lighting in each instance is to obliterate the filmed image, converting the screen into a blank, blinding white field. Dee’s interest in this optical phenomenon meshes exactly with his interest in the relation between the individual frame of a movie and the production of the illusion of movement: that is to say, in both instances the production of one kind of image necessitates the destruction of another. In these brief clips, the burst of light needed by the still photographer in order to capture their image – to ‘freeze’ a moment in time and space – overwhelms the movie camera, shocking the iris and searing the celluloid. The still photograph – the atomic particle within film – explodes, blasting away the superstructure of the moving image. That which provides the conditions for the very possibility of film is also that which may obliterate film. Dee reminds us yet again that presence is predicated upon absence, creation entails destruction, techniques of image production outstrip unmediated perception (cf. the optical unconscious), and illusion depends upon repression and denial.

Dee’s original decision to use 24 monitors was presumably determined by the fact that movies create their illusion of movement by running film through the projector gate at 24 frames per second, thus the material dimensions of this work also function in a thematic or conceptual capacity, typifying Dee’s strategy of indexing the wider filmic apparatus by means of cross-reference. But there is also a further dimension of reference that X24 generates by mean of its physical configuration. As the flashing white image appears to travel in a continuous movement from one screen to the next across the wave of monitors set in an oval, open-wide architecture, the pulsing, stroboscopic effect of this movement is remarkably similar to that produced by a zoetrope.

A technical antecedent of the cinema, the zoetrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures. It consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits on the inner surface of the cylinder is a band which has a set of sequenced images. As the cylinder spins the user looks through the slits at the images on the opposite side of the cylinder's interior. The scanning of the slits keeps the images from simply blurring together so that the user sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, the equivalent of a motion picture. The popularity of the zoetrope was at its peak in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed Eadweard Muybridge’s investigation, from the 1870s onwards, of movement via sequential photographic imagery.

In its sculptural form, then, X24 makes reference to a time before the invention of cinema as it is currently understood. This was a time when the constituent elements of film, and the principles governing their combination, were known and available, but still retained their independence and autonomy. Rather than photography being subsumed by film, as, in the form of the still, it would later be, photography remained a distinct element within the heterogeneous mix that characterized technologies of the moving image at that time. Thus the illusion created by the zoetrope differs from that produced later by cinema in that, in the words of Rosalind Krauss, it “exposes to view the means of this illusion’s production.” This leads to a very distinct experience;

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“the spectator will occupy two places simultaneously. One is the imaginary identification or closure within the illusion…. The second position is a connection to the optical machine in question, an insistent reminder of its presence, of its mechanism, of its form of constituting piecemeal the only seemingly unified spectacle.”1

This, in turn, leads to a “double effect, of both having the experience and watching oneself have it from outside.” Such a pre-cinematic experience of the moving image is perhaps what X24 aspires to. Of course, we should not get too carried way with this suggestion: X24 may reference the zoetrope, but it is not a zoetrope; as 21st century viewers, we cannot choose to forget our cinematic experiences and return to some idyllic state of pre-Hollywood innocence. Nevertheless, there is a strong sense arising from much of Dee’s work that, whilst viewing it, the viewer experiences the “double effect, of both having the experience and watching oneself have it from outside.” Repetition, circling and looping – in all of their registers discussed above - play their part in returning the viewer from immersion in illusion to self-awareness of the act of viewing. In Running Time, for example, we experience moments of total engagement with the onscreen drama (the tense, driving film score; the runner’s desperate plight) that are then contradicted by the film’s insistence upon its own artificiality.

But, finally, the zoetrope aspect of X24 offers us a way to consider Dee’s artistic project from another perspective. As Krauss observes, the zoetrope – along with other pre-cinematic optical devices of the moving image – was linked directly to bodily sensation. The flickering image produced by its whirling slits appeared to beat, throb and pulsate, and thus to replicate the internal rhythm of the body. Such pulsation, such rhythmic throb and beat, are also evident in the stroboscopic effect of the flashing images speeding through the circuit of screens in X24. This beat, Krauss claims, “has the power to decompose and dissolve the very coherence of form on which visuality may be thought to depend.”

Visuality, in this modern sense, is understood as a purely optical experience, a sensation addressed solely to the eyes. As a precondition of visuality, the human sensory system needs to have been subjected to processes of fragmentation and specialization. The body and its senses need to be compartmentalized and ‘re-trained’ in order to perform more effectively in response to the conditions imposed by the processes of industrialization. The logic of the assembly line is applied to the human organism. The cinematic experience is perhaps exemplary of this process, especially in so far as the ‘reality-effect’ of the movie is experienced solely through hearing and sight.

The ‘beat’, however, reconnects vision to the body, to its urges and desires. It is also worth noting here that in the early days of cinema, the projectionist was as much artist and performer as technician, adjusting the speed of projection to suit the emotional and dramatic tone of the on-screen action. The projector was his instrument, an extension of his body to be slowed or accelerated by muscular intervention. The rhythm of the body was thereby integrated into the cinematic experience. I don’t want to claim that Dee’s work reunites us in delirious joy with that sense of body that cinema has denied, but I would suggest that his films offer a way in which we might be encouraged to reconsider those relations between world, representation and body.

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As I have tried to demonstrate, Dee’s ‘deconstructive’ analysis of film opens up a space between his own work and that of cinema in general, a space in which it is possible to develop a critique of cinematic codes and conventions. Such a critique is necessarily ambivalent – it stands in a kind of love-hate relationship with mainstream cinema – but it enables attentive viewers of his work to experience a critical “double effect”. In other words, Dee’s work serves both to celebrate mainstream cinema and to indict it.

His films are increasingly created by means of computer software, removing then even further from any sense of the body and its direct engagement with the material world, but in a work such as X24 it is the body that is the ultimate point of reference. While the rhythmic pulse of the running images engages directly with the body’s own involuntary pulse, the light-bleached screens remind us of the extraordinary capacity and versatility of the human sensory organs. The blinding flash that has ruptured the filmic image has not blinded us: we can watch X24 without physically flinching. The camera may be modelled upon the human eye, but, as a mechanical device, it shares none of the eye’s connections to hope, shame, love, empathy, desire, memory, and so on.

In Man With A Movie Camera (1929) – one of the first great avant-garde films – director Dziga Vertov anthropomorphized the movie camera, using stop-frame animation to give the illusion that the camera on its tripod could walk among (and tower over) the city crowds. If there is an anthropomorphic element to X24 it is not to be found within the technical apparatus of film making, but in its subtle somatic effects (a physiological equivalent, perhaps, to the operations of the optical unconscious) and in its highlighting of the differences between cinema’s means of constructing images of reality and the body’s ways of experiencing reality.

Being registered at both the conceptual and the experiential level, these differences situate the viewer within yet another “double-effect”: they offer an invitation to “occupy two places simultaneously”. At this point we might well recall Dee’s frequent use in other works of the double- or split-screen. What else could this be other than a direct enactment of the “double-effect”, a physical and mental challenge to “occupy two places simultaneously”? It would be a gross distortion to end this series of reflections on Dee’s work with a neat conclusion: providing answers, resolutions or conclusions is not what this work is about. But with the idea of the “double-effect” we arrive at a suitable point to break off. The “double-effect” always asks us to consider things from another angle.

1 Jean Baudrillard, "On Nihilism", On the Beach, 6, Spring 1984. Quoted here from Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard. From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Polity, 1989, p.117.

2 Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in Hal Foster (ed) Postmodern Culture, Pluto Press, 1985.

3 Actually, for anyone familiar with the history of avant-garde film, it also sounds remarkably like an excerpt from the soundtrack of Michael Snow’s legendary 1967 film Wavelength, in which a single and apparently uninterrupted 45-minute zoom shot across the artist’s studio is accompanied by the gradually ascending tone of an oscillator whose rising pitch matches the pace and progress of the camera’s zoom. A similar matching of soundtrack to camera movement is a key feature of Dee’s Running Time, discussed elsewhere in this essay. Such interest in an analysis of the various formal components that constitute film was characteristic of so-called Structuralist film of the late 1960s and 1970s. Dee’s relation to such avant-garde precursors may not seem immediately apparent, but is worthy of further serious consideration than can be offered here.

4 Rosalid Krauss, ‘The Im/pulse To See’ in Hal Foster (ed) Vision and Visuality, Bay Press, 1988, pp. 51-75.

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