Cycles

“One evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and-answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious.”1 The almost century old, now well-known account by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto describes the creative process of his series ‘Theaters‘ (1976) as a kind of epiphany about image making whereby time is compressed into a single frame. Sugimoto’s quest for the single, total image had already been pursued by Western philosopher, Walter Benjamin in 1936. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’, Benjamin announced a future marked by reproduction and the technical transformation of the nature of art with political implications. A couple of years earlier, the French poet Paul Valéry had already anticipated that very profound changes could be expected in relation to the arts, since all visual arts had until then featured a physical component that could no longer be considered or treated as before. Neither matter, nor space, nor time were the same anymore. In The Conquest of Ubiquity (“La conquete de l’ubiquité”) Valéry explains: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly morethan a sign.”2 Benjamin, Valéry, and others have outlined the framework for the theoretical principles that shape our contemporary visual culture. Today, we no longer expect our works of art to be published globally as one offs in physical or digital form. Instead, we are conditioned to reproduce any and every image at any moment, now, in real time and in any place. (...)