Screening the digital - Digital Film Festival, New York, New York

Afterimage, March-April, 1998 by Barbara L. Miller

Last September I attended the inaugural D.FILM/Digital Film Festival in New York City, an event held at The Kitchen on two separate nights. in November, the festival moved on to other locations, including San Francisco and San Diego; and in the spring it will travel to various other cities throughout the United States and abroad (Ed. note: check http://www.dfilm.com for schedule updates). This impressive schedule of upcoming venues suggests that d.film, a constructed term the festival organizers use to indicate digital film, has the potential to influence a variety of producers and viewers, both in this country and abroad. Its ability to do so arises less from its own reputation that, given the newness of the media, has yet to be defined and more from the exhibition space within which d.film made its debut.

In his brief introduction at the start of the festival, Bart Cheever, the chief producer-curator of the show, reminded the audience of the Kitchen's important historical role as a showcase of ground-breaking artistic work. In 1971, Steina and Woody Vasulka established the space, dedicating it to the exhibition of video art. Since then, the Kitchen has been a leader in introducing new media to New York City audiences. It has also influenced the founding of other sites and the programming of other festivals. Because the space was so instrumental in promoting video art, it is appropriate, Cheever argued, that now, 26 years later, the Kitchen should launch d.film's entrance into the art world.

Cheever's comments are somewhat ironic since the very space that opened its doors to early experimental video art is now exhibiting work that all but signals the end not only of such analog-based media, but the exhibition space itself. In many respects, however, d.film's bid to edge out '70s and '80s video art arrives too late. Conversely, its ability to herald the end of such alternative spaces as the Kitchen is a little premature. Nonetheless, the Digital Film Festival was a benchmark event; the work in the festival clearly confirmed that digital media has an exciting future.

As expected, the festival played to a packed audience. Like others around me, I laughed at Paul Kevin Thomason's Billy Ray Shyster's House of Discount Special Effects and Animation Emporium (n.d.). Our laughter, however, abruptly turned into an uncomfortable silence. Although Thomason's opening piece and his The Green Man (n.d.) easily stole the show, Kristen Lucas's Watch Out for Invisible Ghosts (n.d.), a nostalgic re-evaluation of early video games, and Paul Vester's Abductees (n.d.), a visually complex yet inauspicious interpretation of alien abductions, wandered aimlessly through long and underdeveloped scripts. I began to shift nervously in my seat, and noticed others around me doing the same. Confused, I began to fumble in the dark for my copy of the program notes.

The Digital Film Festival, as the art-poster that accompanied the program explains, showcases "low budget films made with computers and other radical new forms of technology. This includes non-linear editing systems, 2-D and 3-D computer animation, digital camcorders and more." In support of this description, the poster also included individual write-ups on each of the 19 shorts in the exhibition. These write-ups promised a wide variety of engaging works. Several artists used "high" art as their source imagery. In Hamlet (n.d.), Andrew Bellware reworks segments of Shakespeare's play and, in Hopper (n.d.), Tom McClure layers fictional characters on top of scanned in images of Edward Hopper-style paintings. Others investigated the world of animation: In The Adventures of Waterbong (n.d.), also a feature on the d.film festival website, Eric Rosner creates a cartoon figure in the shape of a pot pipe. In one rather humorous scene, the character attempts to negotiate with a Turkish immigration official. In Live Nude Girls! Episode 10 (n.d.), Matthew Clark and Mason Nicoll use existing footage; they splice together various genres of anime (Japanese animation), from children's cartoons, to action features, to softcore pornography. Following a different direction altogether, Raquel Coelho bases her The Tapir (n.d.) on a Brazilian myth; in brilliantly colored animated sequences, she recounts the Tupari Tribe's explanation of the origins of the Amazons. Together, these works form an interesting blend that explores high and low art and investigates many forms of Western and non-Western culture. Rather than emphasizing this aspect, however, the program stresses the artists' choice of equipment and software. It is here that my confusion arises.

To produce their pieces, individual artists chose from a variety of video and film equipment. These include digital and high-8 video as well as super-8 and 16 mm film. Depending upon the individual's accessibility, each artist selected from a variety of computer software and hardware ranging from Premiere and Photoshop to Alias, and equipment spanning from Macs to SGI workstations. As a result, the program reads like a "how-to" guide, listing a variety of applications and platforms that prospective digital artists could use to produce similar images. The problem is not the technologically informative descriptions, but the program's misleading definition of the term "d.film."