There is experimental film and then there is experimenting with the mechanics of filmmaking itself. In the hands of Emma Hart and Benedict Drew, a collaborative London-based duo, film operates as both medium and subject. The artists sculpt provocative multi-dimensional performances that delight while destabilizing our established notions of the genre.

Last Tuesday, Hart and Drew presented three works from an ongoing series of untitled performances at Light Industry in association with Performa 09. Taking the formal deconstruction of the moving image as a point of departure, the duo re-appropriates the medium to create a triptych of performance installation aimed at constructing new ways of looking at the form.

The first piece presented within the series, Untitled 6, explores the extent to which film can act as a physical agent within its own process of production. A bevy of vibrantly-colored balloons float in front of a projection screen. Each balloon is attached to a long piece of clear 16mm film, which runs into a projector at the far end of the room. When the projector is switched on, the balloons are pulled, one by one, toward the machine, where they are released from the film and climb toward the ceiling. As the blank film is played, its clear image projects onto the screen behind the balloons, recasting their forms to create deeply saturated colors that frolic within the warmly textured environment of the 16mm’s projection. The uniquely tactile quality of 16mm film evokes a familiar cultural nostalgia, giving the viewer the sense that she is watching a forgotten image unfold. Yet by exposing the mechanics of the image as we watch it take shape, the work firmly grounds us in the present moment. This experience of viewing process and product simultaneously serves to gently disorient our established notions of how time functions within film’s production, and repositions our conception of the medium as a purely two-dimensional form.

The second performance, Untitled 1, sets up a similarly contained creative system. Here, powered laundry detergent is placed in a cone speaker. When the film projector is operated, the sound of its fan is recorded and looped into the speaker, causing the white powder to jump and dance in time with the audio’s rumblings. The event is recorded with a digital camera at close proximity and projected onto the wall of the space. The patterns and shapes that emerge from the activated powder are at once microcosmic and monumental. We feel as if we are looking at an ambiguous primordial image that could simultaneously represent the Big Bang, volcanic activity, or the frantic choreography of subatomic quarks. By allowing the sound of the projector to initiate, Hart and Drew celebrate the rude mechanics of the film’s instrumentation, and subvert the traditional hierarchy that places image before sound within its presentation.

The third piece presented, Untitled 2, constructs a scenario in which the physical filmstrip is given further agency. The 16mm strip is run behind the strings of an electric guitar, which Drew holds in front of the projection screen. As the projector is operated, the film strums along the strings of the instrument, creating a low growling noise. Splices along the filmstrip pluck the strings in a rhythmic fashion to punctuate the music at increasingly frequent intervals throughout. The clear 16mm projection is flashed on and off, first erratically, then with greater recurrence as the performance builds to a climax. This unstable movement between light and dark sharply juxtaposes against the stasis of the tableau and creates an atmosphere of suspenseful disorientation.

The ephemeral nature of these performances reverses the traditional understanding of film as a reproducible form. This inversion allows the medium to function fluidly among multiple genres- as sculpture, musical text, and performative agent. By recasting the medium in such a way, Hart and Drew open up film’s potential for further interpretation and offer new ways of seeing. The effect is pleasurably unnerving and, frequently, totally sublime.

Untitled Performances by Emma Hart and Benedict Drew was presented at Light Industry on November 17 in association with Performa.

Hart and Drew at Light Industry

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