Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art

Abstract

Increasingly, whirring film projectors, diaphanous filmstrips and cinema's apparently obsolete materials more generally have become prominent features of contemporary art. This article explores the widespread pursuit of cinematic obsolescence in contemporary gallery installations, and considers its relation to our current phase of media and technological change. Seen in the context of the much-vaunted transition to the digital age, this artistic phenomenon of engagement with cinema's materiality and historicity may seem an act of nostalgia, or even of mourning, for cinema itself. Even as nostalgic gestures, however, the most sophisticated of these cinematic installations, such as those by Rodney Graham and Atom Egoyan analysed at length here, are a way of thinking cinema, of (re) interrogating its very idea and the possibility of its future. Furthermore, and somewhat paradoxically, for all their courting of obsolescence -in fact, by very virtue of this process -these artistic practices configure not the death of cinema but its continuation.In Transmitting Culture (1997), Régis Debray outlines his conception of the difference between art and technology; or, more specifically, between the afterlife of the artwork and the machine once these objects enter their respective museums:

Film History as Media Archaeology

“…Obsolescence, as I show in the chapter 11, is itself filled with ambiguous potential, having become the reference point of so much media art, where it finds itself configured as a form of retroactive anticipation, which is itself a particular form of narrativization in the register of revisable and reversible temporalities. 86 The Crisis in Narrative: Transmedia Studies and Participatory Culture…”