East, London
Paolo Gioli
On The Edge Of (New) Media
Wilkinson"Paolo Gioli As (New) Media Archaeologist" Wanda Strauven To start with a provocation, I would like to postulate that the work of Paolo Gioli is not cinema. It is not pre-cinema, even not proto-cinema, it is instead new media. Gioli’s ongoing venturing in the photographic (or filmic) realm can be considered a form of new media; it is a new media practice insofar that it explores new uses of already existing media. Rather than restricting Gioli to the status of experimental or underground filmmaker, I suggest to think of him as a new media practitioner who started during the pioneering years of the digital revolution. Hereby I do not want to imply, in no way, that Gioli is producing a form of digital (art) work or that he is a digital filmmaker. The epithet “new” in “new media” is not synonymous with “digital,” although its meaning – as I intend it here – is strictly connected to the digital age, or better to the academic field of “new media studies” (or “digital media studies”) as we know it today. More particularly, it is connected to the work of those new media scholars who question the newness of new media, those who work within the emerging field of media archaeology and try to overcome a linear conception of the history of media in which the digital simply replaces the analogue. If Gioli can be considered as a new media practitioner, it is mainly because he is operating as a media archaeologist in line with – or according to – the principles of the new media branch of media archaeology. Media archaeology, as new subdiscipline of media studies, is developing in at least three distinct areas, which I have called elsewhere the “three branches of media archaeology” and which are, successively, film history, media art and new media theory. These branches (or strands) are chronologically grown layers that are not replacing one another, but are coexisting and often overlapping. To a certain extent, Gioli’s work can be positioned in each of these branches or even function as a bridge between them, but – as my short overview will try to make clear – its true originality can only be fully grasped from the perspective of the third branch. Media archaeology’s first branch is film history as a non-linear enterprise. Closely aligned with new historicism, this branch first emerged in the 1980s in the form of “early cinema studies” as an aftermath of the legendary 34th FIAF conference in Brighton and then, on a parallel track, as Kittlerian-inspired media history. The common agenda of this new generation of film historians and media historians is, on the one hand, the rejection of traditional historiography and its methods of chronology, genealogy and especially teleology; and, on the other, the importance of the (Foucauldian) notions of rupture and discontinuity. The most prominent researchers of this first branch are Thomas Elsaesser and Siegfried Zielinski. For New Film History to arise, an important role was played by contemporary American avant-garde filmmakers, especially – as Tom Gunning remembers – the “unofficially named ‘Chambers Street Group’ of Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, and Ken Jacobs.” Their (re)discovery of early cinema prepared the ground for media archaeology to emerge as a new field in film history; by incorporating early films into their (structural/materialist) works the filmmakers helped film scholars to literally open their eyes. Gioli, who moved to New York City in 1967 and witnessed these important years of American avant-garde cinema, could be said to belong to this same tradition of film historical filmmaking, of rethinking early cinema by working directly with its filmic material. When after his visit to the USA Gioli started making his own films, he did indeed go back to the origins of cinema and produced a kind of proto-cinema (reworking Muybridge prints or Pathé-Baby footage). Yet, unlike Ken Jacobs and the others, Gioli is not just revisiting or paying homage to cinema’s past. His work is less about early cinema’s materiality in terms of (filmic) images than about its materiality as basic condition of production. Gioli is reinventing (early) cinema’s basic apparatus, that is, the camera. And he is exploring the limits of this basic apparatus, not with the eye of a (new) film historian, but rather as a new media hacker belonging to the third branch of media archaeology. But first some words about media archaeology’s second branch, in which (media) historical research is interrelated, even more than in the first branch, with artistic practice. It concerns a specific field within contemporary media art that is characterized by technological time traveling, fetishism of old mechanical machines, artistic resistance against the so-called planned obsolescence of the media industry and, especially, a critical engagement with media’s various temporal layers (past, present and future). This branch has been put on the map mainly by Erkki Huhtamo. Through his experience as media art curator, he identified a whole generation of media-archaeologically inclined artists or “artist-archaeologists,” who in various forms of media installations are “resurrecting the technological past.” It is a tendency that, according to Huhtamo, started already in the 1980s and became very pronounced in the 1990s, especially through the work of Paul De Marinis, Ken Feingold, Lynn Hershman, Perry Hoberman, Michael Naimark, Catherine Richards and Jill Scott. Could Gioli be considered as an artist-archaeologist at the same level as, for instance, Paul De Marinis who with his sound installation(s) The Edison Effect (1989-1993) connects the ages of mechanical, electronic and digital audio technologies, by putting into interaction Edison’s phonograph, vinyl records and CD technology? First of all, Gioli starts already in the 1970s with excavations into cinema’s technological past (from the principles of the camera obscura to the primitive techniques of film printing). But, what is more, he is resurrecting a technological past that did not really take place, such as the history of stenopeic films. He goes back to cinema before the Lumière mechanics, to a form of pre-cinema that however never existed as such (that is, before Lumière), but only afterwards (in Gioli’s own work). In other words, Gioli is destabilizing any sense of chronology or linearity in the history of cinema. Here we should also mention his faithfulness to analogue film in the digital age: to date Gioli goes on working with the analogue, because he doesn’t deem film as material basis (film stock, camera, printing process, etc.) to be obsolete. On the contrary, (analogue) film is to be reinvented, or repurposed, over and over again. The idea of repurposing is central to the third branch of media archaeology. This branch, as adapted and promoted within new media studies since the beginning of the new millennium, is no longer concerned with (Foucauldian) excavations into the past, but instead with very concrete excavations into the media themselves, into their “hidden” programs, into their operability and temporality. It’s about exploring the potentialities of the medium, by literally digging into its materiality, by opening up its devices and repurposing them. A good example is the practice of circuit bending that consists, for instance, in breaking open mobile phones and turning them into music instruments. This electronic do-it-yourself (DIY) practice is celebrated by someone like Garnet Hertz, who in 2011 led a “zombie media workshop” at Transmediale, the annual Berlin festival for media art and digital culture. The participants of the workshop were invited to “create their own customized technical device by repurposing and modifying battery-powered toys.” That the principles of hacking and repurposing can also be applied to cinematic devices is clearly demonstrated by Gioli. As a real DIY-practitioner he builds his own pinhole movie cameras out of old photographic devices. His “shooting flute”, for instance, is a very basic camera, without lenses, just some holes in a hollow stick carrying a strip of celluloid. During shooting, the position of the camera is not horizontal, like a (traverse) flute, but instead vertical. From top to bottom, each hole captures light from a slightly different spatial position, which during projection will be translated into a (temporal) movement that never existed. As observed by David Bordwell, Gioli’s erect camera reminds us of the fact that cinema’s engineering is vertical: “In the camera, the printer, the projector, and the traditional editing machines like the Moviola, the film strip moves from top to bottom, from feed reel to take-up reel. […] With few exceptions […] cinema since the days of Edison and Lumière has been a machine that transported its horizontal images along a steep vertical path.” However, during the simultaneous exposure of the multiple holes, there is no movement or transportation of the filmstrip. With his vertical pinhole camera Gioli somehow reinvents chronophotography, without being interested in the analysis of movement. Another wonderful camera constructed by Gioli is the stenopeic tablet, which consists of a rectangular board neatly wrapped with celluloid and placed between two black parts of an obsolete photo camera box. Because of its format, its flatness and its (black) cover, this self-made device evokes analogy with today’s electronic tablets, such as Apple’s iPad. Yet it is, of course, the most archaic movie camera of the digital age. The cover of Gioli’s tablet is perforated with little holes, which allow light to enter and imprint the wrapped filmstrip inside. All of the “holed” areas will be exposed simultaneously; during projection, when the unwrapped strip of celluloid runs through the projector, the photographed object will appear as a completely fractured cinematographic image. As filmmaker Gioli is clearly operating between cinema and photography, exploring the limits of both techniques by means of the hybrid devices that are his pinhole cameras. His production process is far from being cinema, even if the outcome is. As suggested by Claudia D’Alonzo, whose 2009 interview with the filmmaker is entitled “Cinemahacking,” Gioli can be said to be a true “cinema hacker.” According to D’Alonzo, Gioli “anticipates contemporary hacking intended not only as a deconstruction of the instrument but also and mostly as a construction practice of new meanings and knowledge through technology.” This is precisely the type of hacking that turns new media scholars and/or artists into media archaeologists: they are digging up media devices to explore new meanings, new purposes, new possible futures through a better understanding of the medium’s materiality or technology. Gioli became a “cinema hacker” not only out of desire to build his own instruments (as fai da te or DIY practice), but also out of necessity or conviction to fight the planned obsolescence of the media industry. He believes that the always increasing market of new electronic devices is not a stimulus, but instead a limit; especially for artists, technological innovations can become an obstacle, a blockage for creativity. As he explains to D’Alonzo in the interview: "One thing that frightens me in electronic technology is the obsolescence of instruments. It’s dangerous: it seems to me that the continuous new instruments are a limit and not a stimulus, they do not give creativity time to be just that, creative. The risk is that electronic engineers are more creative than the artists themselves and another risk it that the artists are sucked into the big multinationals of electronics. All this in my opinion is very dangerous; it’s more beautiful to surprise people with nothing." But there is more at stake: Gioli is really driven by an aspiration to explore the potentiality of the cinematic medium. He is digging into the medium in order to use it differently. His use of the cinematic medium is, as suggested by Gabriele Jutz, a “creative misuse.” It is not just an underuse, but rather a deeper use or deep use, which might connect to the concept of “deep time” of the media as theorized and practiced by Siegried Zielinski. With his cinematic excavations (and his obsession of leaving, or even rendering, visible the material traces, such as the frame line and the sprocket hole), Gioli is not just paying homage to the past of visual media; he is instead exploring all the possible directions that the medium has not taken. It is an anti-teleological, non-progressive, even anarchic (or anarchaeological) way of thinking history. As observed by Sergio Toffetti: “Gioli attempts to retrace all the histories of cinema which never took place, the parallel paths to the high road, the turnings not taken, the discarded linguistic possibilities, creating a cinema of super-imposition, double images, graininess, blurs, loops, breaking up of the frame, positive-negative reversals.” In an interview with Giacomo Daniele Fragapane, Gioli narrates how he was looking with a magnifying loop at some waste footage and decided to examine what was between the frames. With this type of experiment, Gioli says, “we are inside the film material [siamo dentro la materia], the film strip, the base of the film, prior even to an image being registered on it.” Most of Gioli’s filmic images are indeed revealing the medium’s materiality, the act of digging into the medium’s materiality. However, Gioli’s most essential media-archaeological quest lies not so much, in my view, in the filmic image itself (or the “destabilized imagery,” as Thompson and Bordwell call it), but rather in the exploration (or excavation) of cinema’s most basic part, that is, the camera. He is pushing the camera to its lowest conditions for making images. By taking away pieces, one by one, such as the lens and the shutter, he is creating the most rudimentary camera. This might seem as a simplification of the cinematic (or photographic) process, but in fact it only renders the process more complex, and also more compelling. By making the obsolete (analogue) camera even more archaic than it ever was, he is resisting very effectively against its obsolescence. Thus, paradoxically, with this most archaic camera Gioli is ahead of his time, turning filmmaking into hacking, into a form of resistance, as a true new media archaeologist. Previously published in Paolo Gioli. The Man Without A Movie Camera, ed. Alessandro Bordina and Antonio Somaini (Milano: Mimesis International, 2014), pp. 17-24.