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

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

The artists in the festival all exported their computer-manipulated footage not to film, but to video. Hence, the media specified in the title of the festival is deceptive. I was, however, willing to overlook this detail and started to re-evaluate my own presuppositions of the media and began to consider other possible meanings of the term, "d.film."

It quickly became apparent that Cheever and those in the festival were self-consciously using the term d.film; they were less invested in the mode of projection and more involved in the technology used to construct and manipulate the image. As such, the title of the media implies that as applications and programs develop the output of the work - the physical manifestation - will become irrelevant. The tools used to alter the image and prepare it for export are of greater significance. In the future, artists will be able to send innovative special effects directly into interactive multi-channel environments and to publish experimental single-channel sequences instantaneously onto websites. In the present, however, the d.films in the festival were neither sent to such artificial environments nor posted, save for a few quicktime clips on the festival's website, to such communication systems. (These clips proved to be more obstructive than communicative; it took my Power PC over 60 minutes to download the images.) Thus, even stretching the festival's designation, its use of the term "d.film" - already in Internet syntax - can only be seen as an expression of great anticipation, an expression that nonetheless leads the curator, in the program notes, to ask the poignant question: "What happens when powerful filmmaking technology falls into the hands of artists and non-filmmakers?"

Undeniably, d.filmmakers' access to powerful ground-breaking applications and equipment leads to some very innovative results. While the artists in the festival use relatively low-end equipment, their explorations of special effects rival many of the breakthroughs found in large-budget cinema. In relation to video art of the 1970s and '80s, their experiments, however, are not that revolutionary. Similar to d.filmmakers, early video artists investigated the boundaries between "high" and "low" art; they incorporated "found" or appropriated media imagery into their work; they layered and composited various source images together. In fact, Nam June Paik, one of the first to bring the video medium into a gallery setting, continues to explore these very issues in his recent work. In Cyberforum (1994), for example, Paik morphs presidential election photographs of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George Bush and Bill Clinton into a continuous video loop. In doing so, he suggests a loss of distinction not only between presidents, but between political parties. Paradoxically, it is this very idea of a loss of distinction that the Kitchen's exhibition most addresses.

D.film's premier forum is not so much about a new media standing in the place of an older technology (many of the d.filmmakers use this very technology as a source material component), but the status of video art, in whatever flavor - digital or analog - in culture today. In the 1970s and '80s, video artists often explored special effects that were for the most part too expensive and time consuming in other media. Since the 1980s, composite images, multi-dimensional depictions and morphing have permeated all aspects of mass media. Films such as Virtuosity (1995, by Brett Leonard) and The Fifth Element (1997, by Luc Bresson), TV shows such as The X-Files and Voyager, and commercials such as R/Greenberg Associates' ad for Shell Oil and Blue Sky Productions' M&M's Celebrity Campaign all use special effects to seduce viewers. The influence of these visual lures extends far beyond the entertainment industry; they have become the window through which mass media frames world famous figures and the structure within which the viewer participates in broadcasts of newsworthy events.