#simonetta fadda

SIMONETTA FADDA legge EXPANDED CINEMA

    Simonetta Fadda, artista, insegna all’Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Milano) e alla Scuola Civica di Cinema e Televisione (Milano) e traduce testi d’argomento filosofico e artistico.

Nel 1999 ha pubblicato uno studio sugli esordi del video come mezzo artistico:Definizione zero, origini della videoarte fra politica e comunicazione (Costa & Nolan - Milano). Tra le sue esposizioni recenti: Kunst Haus Glogauer - Berlino 2007; MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna – Bologna 2008; MAN Museo d’Arte – Nuoro 2008; Cinémathèque Française – Parigi 2008; Bergamo Film Meeting – Bergamo 2010; Museo di Sant’Agostino – Genova 2011; Espace Saint Jacques, Bonifacio – Francia 2011.

  Expanded Cinema

Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 1970. Disponibile in inglese per il download gratuito.

Uscito più di quarant’anni fa,Expanded Cinema è un testo ancora vicinissimo a noi, nel suo approccio “multidisciplinare” a tecnologie e pratiche che oggi sono diventate uno scenario comune nelle metropoli del mondo. L’indagine attraversa il cinema, il video e la media art in generale, tracciando percorsi critici e individuando problematiche estetiche del periodo, ma l’intento non è né di tipo storiografico, né riguarda l’ambito della critica d’arte. Piuttosto, Expanded Cinema rappresenta un importante studio sulle ricadute estetiche e antropologiche di tecnologie che nel 1970 erano ancora nuovissime e oggi fanno parte del quotidiano, in grado di regalarci preziose intuizioni che illuminano il nostro presente e le sue idiosincrasie.

Oggi si fanno più esperienze attraverso uno schermo (del computer, dello smartphone, della playstation, del tablet), che fisicamente attraverso il proprio corpo e in queste esperienze, al posto della realtà “concreta” e “tattile” del reale, si trova una simulazione che produce realtà. Paradossalmente, inoltre, “il computer ha cancellato il passato dell’umanità trasformando tutto in presente”1, secondo le parole di Youngblood, mentre il presente si manifesta soprattutto con la forma dell’immagine non personale, della fiction, e questo appare come un deterrente per l’autonomia di pensiero e di azione individuali. Il presente come fiction rende possibile un’amnesia generalizzata nei confronti del passato, debilitando all’origine la possibilità di prefigurare un futuro possibile2.

Il cinema espanso di cui parla Youngblood nel suo testo, invece, è il campo nell’ambito del quale l’esercizio di discernere realtà e fiction, dominando e controllando i loro flussi nella nostra vita, si sviluppa proprio a partire dalla possibilità offerta dalle nuove tecnologie di creare in prima persona le proprie immagini. Nella visione di Youngblood, questo “esercizio filmico” porterebbe l’individuo a maturare un proprio linguaggio personale, in cui la macchina da presa diventa uno strumento d’indagine profonda in grado di creare nuove realtà nella sua vita, rendendolo contemporaneamente più libero. Nel mondo cibernetico prefigurato da Youngblood, infatti, la ricerca del significato passa attraverso l’elaborazione autonoma e soggettiva di un proprio linguaggio filmico, possibile con le nuove tecnologie.

1 Expanded Cinema versione italiana, p. 109.

2 Come ricorda anche Hannah Arendt, “la facoltà di anticipare il futuro nel pensiero deriva dalla facoltà di ricordare il passato” (Hannah Arendt, La vita della mente, Il Mulino, Bologna 1987-2° ed. 2009, p. 170).

(Note tratte da La coscienza espansa e il tempo personale, postfazione di Simonetta Fadda)

Estratto: "Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass Audience Age. The Rebirth of Cottage Industry"

Just as the individual's unique identity is smothered by a social  system that prohibits education by experiment and restricts creative  living, so society itself as one organism suffers from the effects of  unilateral mass education inherent in the present public communications  network. Future historians would have a grossly inaccurate picture of today's culture if they were to judge our social meanings  and values by the content of the so-called popular media.

Judging from broadcast television, for example, where the individual has little choice of selection, a personality such as Glen  Campbell or a program like " Bonanza" might appear representative  of popular taste because their lowest-common-denominator appeal  satisfies the indiscriminate passivity of most of a hundred-million  viewers. However, if we judge the same society at the same time by  those media that offer personal selection and individual communication —   LP record albums, for example— we find the Beatles as the  representative image: two different worlds existing as one, distinguished  by the technologies through which they communicate. The  same phenomenon occurs in the cinema. The majority of college  students flock to movies like Easy Rider or Alice’s Restaurant, but  when they make their own movies it's a different story entirely. The  crucial difference is between mass public communication and private  individual communication.

But that difference is quickly being resolved. When the proliferation  of technology reaches a certain level of saturation in the  environment, we cease to be separate from it. Communications  technologies shape and record the objective and subjective realities  of Everyman. The intermedia network becomes metabolically and  homeostatically interfaced with each human being. To unplug any  one of the advanced nations from the global telephone network, for  example, would be a more extreme deterrent than any bomb; and the  global television linkages soon will become equally as vital.

In the past we've had two mass personalities: our media personality  and our "natural" personality. Pioneering radio and television  announcers adopted a mode of speech and behavior essentially  unnatural, a formal way of talking and acting through the media. In a  sense, the media function as behavior-altering agents for special  occasions called "shows," much the same as alcohol is a behavior altering  agent for special occasions called "cocktail parties." But the  recent phenomena of "underground" FM radio and "two-way" or  "conversation" radio and television are evidence that we're feeling  more comfortable with our extensions. Soon we'll converse as intimately  over television and radio as we do now over telephones. The  increasing number of twenty-four-hour all-news radio stations is a  symptom of humanity's growing awareness of the monitor function of  the media, even though today's profit-motive news might well be  described as tactical misinformation. The notion of putting on a  "show," although still prevalent in name at least, is losing its  meaning. Inevitably, show business is becoming communication  business, which in turn is becoming education business. And thus  begins the revolution.

The mass-audience, mass-consumption era is beginning to disintegrate  like Hesse's alter ego Harry Haller in Steppenwolf, who  regretted his dual nature until he realized that he not only had two  selves but quite literally dozens. It is generally accepted that the  post-Industrial Age will also be an age of post-mass consumption.

Cybernation virtually guarantees decentralization of energy sources.  There'll be no need for a "department" of water and power, for  example, when we learn to harness solar energy as easily as we  make transistor radios. Inherent in the proliferation of inexpensive  film technology, which caused the phenomenon of personal cinema,  is the force that soon will transform the socioeconomic system that  made commercial mass entertainment necessary in the first place.

Synaesthetic cinema not only is the end of movies as we've known  them aesthetically; the physical hardware of film technology itself is  quickly phasing out, and with it the traditional modes of filmmaking  and viewing. We're entering the era of image-publishing and image-exchange,  the inevitable evolutionary successor to book publishing:  the post-mass audience age.

The hardware and software environment presently exists in which  one can purchase films as easily as one purchases books or records.  The video/film symbiosis accomplished in electron-beam recording  results in the end of "movies" as social event and technical discipline.

The decisive factor in the demise of cinema and TV as we've  known them is the ability to choose information rather than being  enslaved to mass broadcasting schedules or distribution patterns,  restricted by both mode and (profit) motive. This revolutionary  capability exists even though the military/industrial complex withholds  it from us.

Although commercial restrictions are inevitable in the early stages  of the phenomenon, we shall soon find that the personal filmmaker is  equivalent to the major studio. It is now possible to collect hundreds  of cartridges of one's own synaesthetic cinema— images of one's  actual life preserved out of time— for documentation, post-stylization,  and study. For the first time in history every human now has the  ability to capture, preserve, and interpret those aspects of the living  present that are meaningful to him. The key word is interpret. In a  very real sense we can now show both our experiences and our  emotions to one another, rather than attempting to explain them in  verbally abstracted language. There's no semantic problem in a  photographic image. We can now see through each other's eyes,  moving toward expanded vision and inevitably expanded consciousness.

DeMille's Ten Commandments and Brakhage's Dog Star Man both  go into the same ten-dollar cartridges, and then comes the test: the  ability to own and repeatedly view a film is conditional on the  availability of films worth multiple viewings. We shall find that ninety  percent of all cinema in history cannot be viewed more than a couple  of times and still remain interesting. No one is going to pay thirty  dollars to see a movie. The only films capable of supporting multiple  viewings, in the same way that paintings and records are enjoyed  repeatedly, are synaesthetic films in which the viewer is free to insert  himself into the experience differently each time. Thus the technology  that allowed synaesthetic cinema to exist on a mass scale in the  first place is the same technology that will force virtually all image making  toward synaesthesis, the purest manifestation of consciousness.

The individual's ability to apprehend, capture, generate, transmit,  duplicate, replicate, manipulate, store, and retrieve audiovisual information  has reached the point where technology results in the rebirth of "cottage industry  as conceived by the economist William Morris during the Industrial Revolution  in England — the autonomous ability of the individual to generate his own  industry within his own local environment. The primary difference between  Morris' preindustrial view and today's post-industrial reality is that cottage  industry and global cybernetic industrialization interpenetrate each  other's spheres of influence synergetically, each benefiting from the  other.

The introduction of videotape cartridges forces mass  communications  into the untenable position of restricting individual freedom.  Shortly, the educational and aesthetic messages of society will be  communicated through cartridge-exchange and telecommand regional  videotape cable centers; live broadcast television will be free  to move information of a metabolic, homeostatic, interplanetary  nerve-system function. At present, videotape or filmed information  can be electron-beam recorded onto low-cost photosensitive material  which, in the example of Columbia's EVR, results in one-hour  cartridges of 180,000 black-and-white frames or half-hour cartridges  of 90,000 color frames. They can be displayed individually or sequentially  in random-access or automatic modes on any television set  with higher resolution than videotape systems or broadcast TV. The  system reduces broadcast videotape costs by a factor of fifty, home  videotape costs by ten, and is approximately one-fifteenth as expensive  as conventional filmmaking.

Coupled with other technologies such as the Polaroid family of cameras, the videophone, and long-distance Xerography and Xerographic  telecopying, we arrive at a situation in which every TV image and every frame of every videotape or movie in history can now be filmed, taped, photographed, or copied in a number of ways, then  replicated and transmitted— all by the individual. The auteur theory  thus becomes utterly meaningless. We've progressed to the point at  which an "impersonal" or "official" film is unthinkable. There's no  such thing as an impersonal or non-authored film: there is only honest  cinema and hypocritical cinema, and they are measured by the  difference between what is inside and what is outside of the maker's  consciousness. Art is both "adult" and personal: we begin with that  behind us, taken for granted, beneath discussion, and we go on from  there.

For thousands of young persons around the world today, the  cinema is a way of living. As we find ourselves faced with  increasing  leisure time, the camera will become more important as an instrument  of creative living as opposed to its present role as conditioner  of the dronelike existence we now lead. I mean to suggest that the  camera — either cinema, or video, or both — as an extension of our  nervous system, functions as a superego that allows us to observe  and modify our behavior by observing our "software" image just as  world man modifies his behavior by observing his collective superego  as manifested in the global videosphere. By creating new  realities in video/cinema we create new realities in our lives. We  have seen that it is aesthetically and technically possible: let us now  briefly examine the process.

The ethnological filmmaker Jean Rouch, speaking of his cinémavérité  study, Chronicle of a Summer, described the superego function  of the camera with his subjects: "At first," he said, "there's a selfconscious  hamminess. They say to themselves, 'people are looking  at me and I must give a nice impression of myself.' But this lasts only  a very short time. And then, very rapidly, they begin to think— perhaps  for the first time sincerely— about their problems, about who  they are, and they begin to express what they have within themselves.

As the film progresses and the people see the rushes, they  begin to think about the character they were representing involuntarily—  a character of which they had been completely unaware, that  they discovered on the screen all of a sudden with enormous  surprise. And so the film becomes a reason for living and they feel  they must play that role. However, they will often deny the authenticity  of the film, claiming they were putting on for the camera,  because what has been revealed of them is so personal, a role which  normally they would not project to the world.

"But something very strange occurs: the cinema becomes for them  a pretext to try to resolve problems that they were not able to resolve  without the cinema. I'm convinced that ninety percent of what they  say is extremely sincere, and out of that they would never have had  the courage to say at least ten percent without the cinema. The  extraordinary pretext is, if you wish, the possibility to say something  in front of the camera and afterwards be able to retract it, saying it  was just for the camera. The extraordinary possibility of playing a  role which is oneself, but which one can disavow because it is only  an image of oneself.” 29

The new filmmaker no longer is required to make drama or to tell a story or even to make "art," though art may certainly result. Personal cinema becomes art when it moves beyond self-expression to encompass life-expression. Art is not created; it is lived. The artist merely reports it. Synaesthetic cinema is not filmed so much as experienced onto film or videotape. As an extension of the citizen's nervous system it can't be judged by the same canons that traditionally have represented art. It's simply the first utterance of human beings who've found a new language. If art is involved, it's the art of creative living as opposed to passive conditioned response. The possibility of realizing one's innermost desires with the excuse that it's "just for the film" is a temptation that will be too strong to resist when we're released from the needs of marginal survival. Wallace Stevens: "It is the explanations of things that we make to ourselves that disclose our character: the subjects of one's poem are the symbols of one's self or one of one's selves."

Along with each man's life being the subject of his own study is the need for each man to be consciously part of Man's life. "In dreams," said Yeats, "begin responsibilities." Buckminster Fuller has said that the great aesthetic of tomorrow will be the aesthetic of integrity. For ten thousand years more than five hundred generations of agricultural men have lived abnormal, artificial lives of repetitive, boring toil as energy slaves who must prove their right to live. But now we are on the threshold of freedom. We are about to become our own gods. We are about to face the problem of values. Bronowski: "The problem of values arises only when men try to fit together their need to be social animals with their need to be free men. There is no problem, there are no values, until men want to do both."30

For the first time in history we're approaching that point at which both will be possible if we fashion our lives with a sense of integrity. We've modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in it. If we're all to become one, the ethics of individual man must become a meta-ethic for global man.

Donald Schon: "In seeking a meta-ethic we suffer from the fact that society traditionally delegates the job of change to special individuals in its midst, to artists, inventors and scientists— and then isolates them from the rest of society in order to preserve the illusion of stability of norms and objectives.''31

Not only must we completely revise our attitudes toward "ownership" of the physical earth; we must also learn to accept the fact that  the ideas and creations of humanity do not belong to any one individual. Thus technology not only helps maintain the present level of mankind's integrity, it actually forces us to increase that integrity and provides the social framework within which to begin. Freedom is the acceptance of responsibility. Bronowski speaks of the "habit of truth" as it applies to scientific experiments. Contemporary man in general might be said to practice a habit of hypocrisy: "There is no more threatening and no more degrading doctrine than the fancy that somehow we may shelve the responsibility for making the decisions of our society by passing it to a few scientists armored with a special magic. The world today is made and powered by science; for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes toward slavery."32

The irresponsible audience will learn responsibility when it becomes its own audience through the synaesthetic research of expanded cinema and image-exchange. And in this activity it will come to discover the scientific meta-ethic. "The practice of science compels the practitioner to form for himself a fundamental set of universal values... the exactness of science can give a context for our nonscientific judgments."33 By its very nature synaesthetic cinema will close the gap between art and science because the art of creative living must become a science if life is to hold any meaning in the Cybernetic Age.

29"Jean Rouch in Conversation with James Blue," Film Comment (Fall-Winter, 1967), pp.

84-85.

30Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1965), p 55.  

31Donald Schon, Technology and Change (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), p. 24.

32Bronowski, pp. 5, 6.