artist's biomuto- derived from the latin “mutare”, or “to change”, as in “mutation”.
scope- derives from the scientific Latin suffix -scopium, meaning a viewing instrument, which in turn originates from the ancient Greek verb skopein, to examine.
An installation-based interactive art exhibition utilizing the forms and aesthetics of late-Victorian era visual techonologies to encourage viewers to engage in critical reflection on the interplay between visual technologies and production of subjectivities in contemporary society.
The “Mutoscope” was a late-nineteenth century invention that made possible the viewing of motion-pictures. Along with “Kinetoscopes”, “Tachyscopes”, the ironically named “Panoptikon”, and a panoply of other late-victorian visual technologies, the mutoscope utilized hundreds of individual photographic prints that flash past the eye in the manner of a mechanized flip-book.
These early attempts at motion-pictures are charming in their ingenuity and functioned as critically influential prototypes for the emergence of cinema proper. Indeed, these viewing devices were so effective as to have been commercially viable beginning in the 1890s and continuing, concurrent with cinematic projection, well into the 1930s. My interest in this technology stems from a suspicion that the mutoscope functioned not only as a stepping-stone in developing the technics of moving-pictures, but also as a device that trained the general public in the mechanics of vision and as a site for exploring what would become the visual conventions of cinema.
Mutoscope will therefore be a critical inquiry into how the viewing technology of the mutoscope is experienced by modern-day viewer, in an attempt to engage these viewers in a process of deconstructing the ways that we understand moving images psychologically as well as phenomenologically. To do this I will construct a number of objects that play upon either the viewing structure of mutoscopes or replicate the flip-book viewing technology itself.
The sculptural objects will retain the something of the aesthetics of their nineteenth century precursors. The idea is to create indeterminacy with regard to the historical origin of the sculpture, such that the viewer is forced to wonder about when this thing was constructed.
This piece will appropriate the structures, aesthetics and cinematic conventions of 'mutoscopes' and other proto-cinema genres in the form of a stand-alone 'peep-hole' interactive video player. By reproducing the viewing structure of the mutoscope, this project seeks to create a relationship to moving images that is ontologically separate from that of cinema proper. Unlike the dream-space of the theater, with its dimmed lights, comfy chairs and projection systems designed for collective viewing, the person watching a mutoscope is positioned as a stooped but standing object, who, with his/her back turned to the lit and potentially crowded room and his/her eye in the viewing slot, is robbed of his/her ability to see others seeing him/her. (S)he mimics the gesture and posture of the voyeur; peeking through a key-hole (s)he takes joy in watching without being seen, and yet, on this side of the metaphorical 'door', we can all watch him/her watching.
The notion of that subjectivities in contemporary society are a product of our specular economy has become commonplace in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Lacan's "Mirror-Phase", Foucault's "Panopticon" and Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" have, ironically, become canonical texts of post-modernity; taken together these texts represent a damning critique of a visual culture that structures its subjects through imagry, reproduces that subject as an image, and requires that that image circulate as a commodity . It is similarly assumed that the primary mode for analysis of these specular economies is cinema (or its derivative heirs television and video). There is an increasing amount of theoretical investigation into the internet and new media as an alternate structure of visual economy, much of it coming directly from the artist/technologists that produce these structures to begin with. The Mutoscope project takes those relationships, between 'art' and 'theory', as its inspiration, but locates the specular structure in the antique technology of mutoscopes.
Mutoscopes and kinetoscopes were important precursors to cinema technology at the turn of the twentieth century. Along with dozens of other similarly concieved contraptions, these machines were largely consigned to the dust-bin of history when the Lumičre brothers began to project moving images on a screen. The key difference between these two sets of technology is that, unlike cinema proper, mutoscopes did not involve projection; the images are printed, as a series of photographs, on paper, and is visible only through a tiny window in the top of the machine. This meant that only one audience member at a time could view the moving-pictures on display. The sense of collectivity that is provided by cinema proper quickly became central to the viewer's experience. It is in that collectivity that Walter Benjamin located the utopian impulse of cinema (Illuminations 240), and that Hitler realized cinema's propaganda potential. Thus, for nearly a century, individual viewing apparatuses must surely have harkened to the antiquated, and out-moded, specular techonologies of the kinetoscope and the mutoscope.
Today, however, individual viewing techonologies proliferate at an astounding rate: personal DVD viewers, iPod videos, uTube, and VR game interfaces are only a few of the genres in which the isolated individual is imagined as the primary audience. In an attempt to unpack the meanings of such monadic architechures of vision, the Mutoscope project will re-invent the viewing structure of its namesake and function as a tool in analysis of how subjects are structured by their gaze/ the Gaze.
By aesthetically mimicing the 'choppy' feel of mutoscope chronophotography (the chronological prints flip by at a rate of three or four frames per second, a fraction of the thirty frames per second that is the standard for video), Mutoscope points out the double-deception of video;
- the first deception (that of film) being that the eye is not fast enough to see the film stills as seperate images. This deception is deconstructed by using many fewer frames per second and by allowing the viewer to slow down the action, thereby making obvious the specular artifice.
- the second deception (that of video) being that video is not actually made up of 'frames' but, rather, of scanlines/pixels that function as an extended visual metaphor based on cinematic viewing convention. This second deception is also brought to the forefront by the very nature of a machine that uses computer programming to replicate the visual effect of a century-old technology.
Lacanian and semiotic theory readily lend themselves to radical interpretation of this project both in terms of the topology of presentation and the interactive content of the "films" on display. The portion of the content that I will produce will consist of a camera on a tri-pod on a beach. The camera is reflected by a mirror such that the viewer sees that it is, in fact, a camera that is recording the vision before him/her. This as an attempt to build a viewing experience in which the viewer is invited to recognize his/her own mis-identification with the mechanical apparatus of the camera, the filmic convention that has come to be known as 'suture'. By pointing out that mis-identification, the project seeks to illustrate the fragility of subjectivity, as well as interrogate how our subjectivities are structured through technologies of vision, and thus subject to historical shift.
The mis-identification of the viewing subject with the vision of the cinematic apparatus is further emphasized by a function of the jitter programming. A surveillance camera, postioned in the installation, sends a live feed depicting the person playing with Mutoscope to the computer, which, in turn outputs that feed, through Max/MSP/Jitter to the subset of the viewing screen that otherwise shows the reflection of the camera on the beach in the mirror. Thus, with each turn of the hand-crank, the viewer sees images of his/her own body-as-voyeur (but cannot, by virtue of the structure of the mutoscope technology, see his/herself looking at the camera) alternating with the reflection of the camera in the mirror, even as the narrative elements of the film play out. This accomplishes more than a computing trick; the viewing subject is made specifically aware that (s)he is being viewed with out being able to return that gaze, and is invited to think critically about the ways in which his/her performed-identity is a function of panoptic social/technological structures.
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