Image, movement, space: testing and expanding the formal boundaries of film, Doug Aitken ties in with the experimental practice of Expanded Cinema.
How can the film image be transferred into space? What role does the viewer play? What can, what should film be? In the 1990s, Doug Aitken began integrating numerous, often oversized screens or projections into his cinematographic installations that appropriate the exhibition space and surround viewers or serve as a circuit for them to follow through the presentation. For the film itself this means that it is never perceived in its entirely but rather always in its fragmentary multiplicity. Viewers are subjected to an interplay between image, sound, and spatial structures, become part of a figuration that necessarily remains broken and asynchronous. Thus Aitken time and again challenges the boundaries of the experience of time, space, and image, and the viewer to mentally complete the film. An endeavor that he shares with that generation of artists who devoted themselves to the expansion of film in the 1960s. The media theorist Gene Youngblood's theoretical considerations form the basis of the discourse on Expanded Cinema.
Beginning in the 1960s, filmmakers such as Tony Conrad, Stan Brakhage, Anthony McCall, Stan Vanderbeek, Andy Warhol, or the German artists Birgit Hein and Peter Weibel dealt extensively with film. Their common goal: to literally liberate the medium from its traditional spatial arrangement and enable it to be experienced in a new way. The film avant-garde began experimenting with the formal structures of film in the early 20th century. Yet beginning in the 1960s, film was not only structurally and aesthetically rethought by means of multiple projections, sculptural installations, live performances, sound experiments, and the intended inclusion of the viewer. Rather, what it was about was a new mode of experiencing art and cinematic language, which Gene Youngblood referred to as "synaesthetic," hence an experience that ideally had a consciousness-expanding effect. According to Youngblood, synaesthetic cinema is relational; it constitutes itself through the combination of any number of factors and relationships. The formal and content-related information of an image as well as the ability of viewers to perceive, piece together, and interpret it are essential features of any film. Thus viewers are assigned an active role--they are not only called on to move within film installations but complete the film in the first place through their perception.
In Expanded Cinema, film does not want to tell a story or depict anything; it even does without conventional narrative strategies and patterns. Form and content meld, producing fluid visual worlds. The new mode of vision, the synaesthetic mode, than allows a special form of consciousness to emerge that Youngblood, borrowing from Sigmund Freud, describes as "oceanic consciousness": when viewing these visual worlds, gaze and mind alike lose themselves to then open themselves up for new sensuous experiences. What sounds a bit like new age mentality is in fact a very consistent analysis of the technical and artistic developments of that time. For Youngblood argues that with the growing popularity of television, cinema was liberated from its "duty" to reflect human life. Instead, the cinema can and must transgress its own boundaries, appropriate new areas. The synaesthetic language of cinema is only fitting for the postindustrial information age, in which sensuous experience is no longer uniform and linear but connected to electronic information that expands in all directions.
Doug Aitken's "Black Mirror" from 2011 has already been presented in a slaughterhouse and on a ship as a multimedia event that is simultaneously performance and stage play. Hectically edited film footage flickers on screens that shows the same female protagonist at different locations throughout the world. At the same time, the same woman, the actress Chloë Sevigny, moves within a spatial installation; sometimes she is lying on a bed in a sparsely furnished hotel room, other times she is standing on a platform surrounded by pole dancers, dancers, or musicians. A story is hinted at, yet it is never told to completion. Instead: fragments, feedback, overlapping, shifts. In order to orient oneself in this kaleidoscopic framework, the viewer has to collect the audible and visual information and piece it together. And as Martin Herbert, one of the contributing authors to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition "Doug Aitken" states, one has to compromise the meaning of oneself in order to reach the place "where selfhood merges wholly with a hallucinatory landscape."
If in the 1960s Expanded Cinema was concerned with expanding the formal boundaries of film, Doug Aitken consistently continues to pursue this goal with contemporary technical means and themes. In the case of "Black Mirror" this means: diverting and losing oneself in the most wonderful way only to find oneself somewhere else.