Monday 17 November 2014

"Forbidden Symmetries" (excerpt) in The Austrian Film Museum




A section of the collaborative feature film "Forbidden Symmetries(2014) will play at The Austrian Film Museum on Wednesday 26th November 18:30 pm as part of Daniel Fitzpatrick's contribution to 'The Invisible Cinema – Film, Art, History, and the Museum' (Lectures and Conversations: Nicole Brenez, Chris Dercon, Noam M. Elcott, Daniel Fitzpatrick, Lars Henrik Gass, Siegfried Mattl, Winfried Pauleit and Jacques Rancière).


Expended Cinema – Curating Cinema’s Futures During an Era of Transition (Daniel Fitzpatrick) 

In relation to cinema’s digital futures a time for prognosis seems now to have passed, apparently all we need do to understand the shape of this digital future is look around us. In spite of the rhetoric that initially supported this transition it can seem that the digital ‘revolution’ (an awkward term for a transformation that has witnessed a large degree of unreflective acquiescence) has perhaps not led to the ‘opening up’ of possibility it once promised but rather to a further calcification of ‘what cinema is’, at least if we are to consider it in terms of its more visible, more mainstream iterations. While the dematerialisation of cinema now seems like a distant memory its despecification gathers apace. The following article will consider several instances of curatorial practice iterated in relation to the cinema’s recent transitional era. It will include references to gallery exhibitions like Hall of Mirrors (MOCA, LA 1996) and Future Cinema (ZKM, 2002) alongside curatorial projects realised in relation to the cinema space (Kubelka Was ist Film? project, 1996-). Each of these instances is considered in relationship with the emergence of a digital future which threatens to subsume existing understandings of cinema, almost entirely.