Size Matters: iPod versus IMAX
Edwin Carels
Screens are here to stay. From gigantic multiplex screens to the one on your mobile phone, from wide-screen home cinema to the built-in film viewer in the headrest of an aircraft seat, from the monitor in your pocket game computer to the whole façade (or even ‘skin’) of a building: screens are everywhere, in all possible shapes and forms. But what film maker or audiovisual artist is really still intensively involved with the optimal use of the ‘aspect ratio’ of any specific technology or medium? The thematic programme Size Matters has been developed from this opening question. The concept of screen culture now commonly posed in film studies comprises the ‘quest’ of film images to many kinds of destinations. Urban screens and locative media are important trends in topical visual culture. While the last century was the era of the moving image, the 21st century will probably be characterised by the moving screen.
This is the visible side, which is also symptomatic for several invisible tendencies. The cinema and the TV room are no longer the only place where people watch screens. Ever since the invention of radar, electronic monitors have increasingly formed a regular part of our everyday environment. One of the most important subsidiary effects of this explosive growth in screen images is the mixture of private and public, the communication urge and intimate experience, generic messages and personal perception. There are no longer any ‘unguarded moments’; flickering screens guide our gaze and dictate the rhythm of our strolls through the city.
Longing for entrancement
The longing for entrancement or tele-transportation through images is much older than film itself; for instance, think of the Panorama Mesdag, a giant painted panorama where you can step ‘inside’ the image. Or the Lumières, who installed a gigantic screen at the world fair in 1900 and experimented with stereoscopic images. But also in the post-cinema era, we still strive continuously for entrancement. By now we have reached the point where IMAX screens can be animated by the latest technology: computer graphic 3D cinema. Such 3D effects have been the ambition of film makers for decades, but soon the exception may well become the rule, at least in animation films. At the same time, the ‘expanded-cinema’ tradition from the 1960s is being revived and experimental film makers are playing out all kinds of combinations of multiple projections.
Size Matters is most emphatically a story about the power of the image, the urge to impress. Both advertisers and media activists are manipulating the force field between large and small scale with conscious strategies. In selecting the works on the following pages, both playfulness and a critical attitude were important criteria. Two questions emerged: how far does the concept of a ‘screen’ stretch? And how far can human comprehension stretch? The enormous explosion in formats and technological innovations, all typified by a focus on scale and dimensions, have an ambiguous effect. While a range of inspiring possibilities emerge, there are also a lot of confusing side effects as a result of these rapid developments.
The imperceptible visible
From nanotechnological close-ups to cosmic views, Size Matters investigates how the visual arts and sciences enter into a dialogue on the main issue: people as the measure in an expanding technological universe. Attention for the big picture! But major revolutions often secrete themselves in a small corner. Miniaturisation, a consequence of microprocessors getting smaller and smaller, has a major impact. Not only screens, but also cameras keep shrinking in size continuously. For instance, the clumsy 35mm camera is getting competition from recording technology using equipment not much bigger than the head of a nail. In science, the photographic camera as a ‘window on the world’ has already been surpassed and replaced by other methods of visualisation. As a result, we now have nanotechnological images from electron or atomic microscopes and a light source is no longer necessary to make something visible. The high-technology camera is an active agent that encodes reality for us into a visual picture instead of turn it into an analogue reproduction. The human eye is no longer the frame of reference to observe the world. And even the camera as a prosthesis for the human eye is now increasingly making way for equipment that might not even need rays of light to register things and show them graphically. Our powers of imagination are repeatedly being surpassed by a scientific depiction of the imperceptible.
The shrinking of technology, which makes it so ubiquitous, does something with the way we relate to the world, even in a literal sense – for instance with a SatNav. But it also influences the way in which we see ourselves, how we situate ourselves in that grander, increasingly complex whole. Thanks to the cinema, the close-up came into being, enriching our cultural idiom in a fantastic way: photographic detail, extremely lively, magnified enormously on a huge screen. And technologies have now come so far that we are no longer surprised that unborn life can be followed in 3D or that new DNA can be slotted together in front of our eyes.
Tired of our own earth
It’s only very occasionally that a fundamentally new viewing experience is offered. Since ancient times, we have peered at the boundaries of the heavens, but it’s only since the first spaceflight that we have seen a photographic image of our own planet and can situate ourselves. Satellite technologies led to SatNav and Google Earth, which enable us to orient ourselves at any moment at any spot on earth. We can look at ourselves like God. It’s handy, but sometimes also worrying. Because what does Google Earth do to our image of the world, to our self-awareness and to visual culture? What do national borders mean? Who keeps track of the all-seeing eye? Where do the supercomputers hide that make all this possible? Will we soon tire of our own earth?
What do artists and film makers do with the idea of physical intimacy now that the final frontier has been reached? Is there any way that artists can measure up to the impact of scientific iconography? And how ‘realistic’ are scientific images anyway? Which formal conventions are being complied with? And how can audiovisual artists exploit this in any significant way? Behind all this is the exponentially increasing capacity of computer memory and all kinds of processes that achieve the greatest possible acceleration on the smallest possible scale. How long will people remain the measure for all things?
Size Matters invite you on a voyage of discovery from screens of different sizes in different film theatres to contemporary urban screens on apartment buildings. Through an exhibition, Size Matters leads to a series of live moments in the form of performances, lectures and interventions. In this way, everyone can select their own made-to-measure programme.