Sunday 27 January 2013

Audience Studies: studying how television gets watched

This chapter looks at the approach to the site of audiencing based based in the discipline of cultural studies. Focus here will be to review 3.2 ethnographies of audiencing (p206) 

Background: ethnographers expose features of everyday life (habits, routines and rituals, small talk and gossip) that are taken for granted, commonplace and trivial. Their work seeks to understand meaningful social life (worlds) first hand, direct experience...techniques and methods involve participating, observing, listening and talking to people as they go about their everyday lives. 

ethnography then is a window, a flanderer into other peoples lives, it is Gillespie states; (2005 p207) 'suited as a method that explores the way active interpretation of the mass media takes place in the richness of everyday contexts. Furthermore, Fiske (p206) describes audiencing as a variety of practices, an activity. 

however Rose states due to the changes in the digital media environment and its increase over the past decade, people are able to move more fluid between activities, for example; we can if we want to watch the tv, send texts and answer emails all at the same time...some theorist argue that different media technology now saturates our lives and it is difficult to see how audiences should be thought of and how they should be researched which as a result causes implications for the ethnographer ..
Rose suggests that in particular the home, which would involve the ethnographer to observe an audience over an duration of time...talking to them about their viewing, but other things too.. ethnographer, James Lull (1990) suggests that there are 4 things to consider when planning a study of a particular audience:


  • access to the audience. Lull (1990) is difficult and suggests a committee board run by a church or school, explain what you want to do but to keep vague. Ask for membership list and then contact names. he suggest that 25-30% of families contact will agree to participate in study.
  • observation techniques. Lull suggests recording what you see and hear: unobtrusive note-taking
  • data collection. Lull advocates that spending between 3-7 days with a family is enough to offer their behavior. for example: 1-2 days- what the house looks like, family history etc, day 3-4 to exercise recording the family dynamics, i.e. participating in important routines. Final stage is to interview each member of family separately.
  • analysing data. Lull comments, ethnographer generates a lot of data from observational notes and interview material all of which requires to be interpreted

He also comments on the fact that the research although maintains a disinterested eye and ear..the objective observer-reporter, must not give away during the process what their real object of (Lull 1990 )
interest, that is: television viewing. 

  • Walkerdine's (1990) account of a family watching Rocky ii (in the home) observing their activities as an academic researcher she describes a personal account of her own revulsion of the scene and the working man watching it (p210) and how later when watched alone she becomes upset when viewing the same scene in a different way...she states that class dynamics of the situation were invisible to her, her being an academic (reflecting as an audiencer too) and he the working class. 
  • Gillespie spending 2 years in Southall living with a family, does this question how much time is required when observing a families activity? Gillespie argues that watching TV and more so talking about is important to the way social identities are made. described as 'TV Talk' 
To conclude is to look at Morley (television audiences and cultural studies (p 18) in particular 4. Audience studies, now and in the future? here Morley states television audiences were thought of a passive consumers 'to whom things happened as televisions miraculous powers affected them'...he continues, 'turned into zombies'. however we know this not to be true, Morley takes Evans (1990) suggestion that recent audiences are active (I maintain here that this is simply because of the advancements of new technology, i.e. reality shows such as big brother, skating on ice, 'i'm celeb get me out of here', who wants to be a millionaire audience's (home or indeed elsewhere) are open to choice to watch and vote for there favorite whilst perhaps, doing other activity's. 

referring back to a report (works on progress submitted 2011 Northumbria University) I have toyed with the idea to whether the recipient is, or is not, an ‘active’ participate to the creative process. The notion ‘interpassivity’, a term that describes the act of delegation or better still how we see works of art self-fulfilling, as discussed by Pfaller (2003) when replacing it with interactivity in art is,

... ‘to record a program they feel relaxed and go out to meet some friends while the program is shown. Later they come home, they check whether everything has been recorded, and then, with deep satisfaction, they put the tape on a shelf without ever watching it. It is as if the machine had watched the program instead of the observers, vicariously’.

Arguably Warhols films can be viewed in the same way, for example; 'Sleep' five hours and twenty one minute’s (1963) and ‘Empire State Building’ (1964) eight hours and five minutes, ‘the impassivity (Le Choismier Christophe, date unknown), and resistance to interpretation formed by the repetitive images define Warhol's journey into cinematic art. Film Culture 33 (1964) present an interesting description ‘The first thing he does is that he stops us from running...his camera rarely moves’, it appears to remain on the screen always, you are aware of the ‘flicker, Crimp (2012 p142) of the film projector, which lays down a beat sixteen per second to organise the moment of the grain from frame to frame’. To demonstrate the notion of Interpassivity but from another perspective is ‘apparatus theory’, Baudry (1974) argued that ‘cinema worked through identifications not only with characters in the movies, but also with the position of the camera’. Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Rope (1929), and The Birds (1963) amongst others, are significant examples of characters representing the spectator’s side of the screen. Furthermore, Wood (1989 p102) suggests that 'we tend to select from a film, quite unconsciously those aspects that are most relevant to us, to our problems and our own attitude to life, and ignore the resthe continues that we tend to use such identification as a means of working out our own problems in fantasy form.
The idea of the spectator being interpassive is an interesting concept, if I view the creative process as a self-fulfilling product, that enjoys itself on our behalf through media such as film, internet, TV etc, the spectator in effect is positioning, Strange, (2005 p78) ‘themselves as the cultural consumer outside the creative process’, however I also contend that they are part of the product by examples offered above??   

What does all this mean exactly, is it the apparatus we choose to use, that is, TV, (red button setting on TV to enable us to interact) recording, forward/backward, Ipod, laptop, mobile etc etc, I think its not about being passive I prefer the term interpassivity as noted above, if we allow ourselves to rely on such technologies and at the same time pursuing other activities that are not necessarily in the confines of a living room, but on a train, bus, pub, cafe etc...There is no particular routine set anymore, changes in society means that we can allow ourselves to dip in and out as we please. Pfaller notes, 'the true motivation for readymade laughter in TV comedies is interpassivity. I don't have to engage in recognising, sympathising with and interpreting the drama'











Saturday 26 January 2013

Silence

Silence (p33)
Silence, Koch discusses Warhol's phase as a film-maker (1963-66) where at this point of his career he was working predominately making silent films, in black and white. Although there are plenty of films to chose from, such as kiss, 1 hour, Eat, 45 minutes and Empire State Building- 8 hours. Koch's main focus is the infamous 'sleep'-6 hours of a man (John Giorno) sleeping. Koch says 'these films were among Warhol's most brilliantly successful and important...when the silents were made, they were accompanied by a 'word of mouth' report throughout New York', further they were films to be talked about...and the obscure reason behind this was that people did not have to go to see them.
However further on Koch states, as the screenings began to be know, an audience developed, these were he says,' film makers and their friends,stars of the films and friends of friends' Of Sleep, very few people were able to sit through it, at early screenings, Koch states; 'they came forewarned, to make an evening of it, chat with friends, leave and return, and all the time the film remains on the screen....its time dissociated from that of the audience, the image glows up there stately and independently' .. 'if one only glances at the image from time to time, it plunges one into a cinematic profundity, (emotional depth) in a single stroke the image effects complete transformation of all temporal modes associated with looking at a movie'  

Sleep (Koch p40) has its own temporal pace, a different form our own, we slip in and out at our own will our time being our own and perhaps by the clock's. Koch states; 'what is sleep....but our nightly release from the clocks prison, filled and flashing with the dreaming motions of the mind and yet a immobility, a quietude in which seconds and hours are confounded'. (confused) and this he says is..'what we gaze at so voyeuristically in 'Sleep' bound to the unchanging clock of the cameras mechanical eye. 

Note: associations with prior research to Hillary Lloyd's work, the camera acts like her eye, and her gaze is exacting and intense. She allows her subjects to perform for the camera....associates to Fishers POV, Kinocinema and Baudry (1974) argument that ‘cinema worked through identifications not only with characters in the movies, but also with the position of the camera’. Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Rope (1929), and The Birds (1963) among others, are significant examples of characters representing the spectator’s side of the screen. 

To continue; voyeurism appears to play an important role in all of Warhol's film's, Koch suggests that 'he is the man who distances himself'...he is the one who waits...not missing the smallest detail, the one who see's..and by defining himself as someone whose presence must remain unknown, as the one who not there...viewed psychoanalytically, the voyeur is somebody who distances ones self from human contact, living out the characters role through the mechanism of camera's eye, hidden in the darkness of the cinema's auditorium. Furthermore; the camera takes the place of the absent voyeur, it is the witnessing and recording eye. We the audience sit a distance from the screen and the ''language Koch suggests (p44) is filled with image held within the distance of silence, a decorative disjunction of time, in the nearness and remoteness of film mingling in an experience of the person revealed and withheld at once' ...Watching the film you understand this notion at once, I am there next to this man, but then I am not, the equipment (laptop, the sound it creates presents the threshold. I do not know him but there is punctum, although this could be argued as Barthes suggests that there is no punctum in moving image (camera lucida) but I guess the image is so slowed down it has become on the verge of photographic image*..


Warhols 'Sleep' 1936









*Mulveys new book Stillness in moving image, death 24x a second takes this concept further by looking at newtechnologies that have the ability to slow down and stop old films, creating new ways of seeing and thinking about an image...i plan to get this book. she also has a talk Monday 18th February, Jerwood, London  http://tomorrowneverknows.org.uk/events  


         

Thursday 24 January 2013

Screening room and Death....And POV!

2007

Keywords: Film, museum, POV (point of view), death, cinema, theatre, audience, objects, spectator, temporal, space

In 2007, the international short film festival Oberhausen. London based curator ian white along with other guest curators, organised a series of screenings kinomuseum. Artists, writers,  curators such as Pierre Bismuth, Mary Kelly and Dan Graham among others conceived their film programmes as imaginary rooms in a museum of their choice...the focus here was to form a relationship between cinema and the museum...and image a new museum rising from the foundations of the cinema auditorium. 

The book (an extended catalogue for the project) brings together a collection of written works, talks and screenings formed by the artists, writers and curators.

kinomuseum is (white p13 2007) 'a proposal for considering a particular kind of cinema as a unique kind of museum  ''one where its originality, authenticity and presence'' are not undermined by reproduction, but where reproduction either turns these qualities into a new set of questions for the museum, almost physically disrupting it'....'it leads to a differentiated cinema, a museum, working on the notions of impermanence (not permanent), immediacy (immediate), temporal and the temporary, manifested (obvious) to the audience who experience in the space and time of the auditorium..the museums permutating (arranging of objects..) exhibition hall, and who are its active, defining agent'.

But what does this all have to do with the cinema??? the answer is it is contingent, dependent for existence... dependent on its the theoretical auditorium within the confines of a industrial model, film (white p 20) is a infinitely (no boundaries) reproducible medium, that is it shows the same work to the same maximum people at a maximum number of times'...white continues to suggest that; cinema audiences claim ownership over the work for which they have paid a fee for...the same work being viewed in many cities, countries...Note: and further still at different times of the day simultaneously.
the museum then as discussed by Kaprow & Robert 1967 (what is a museum?) 'is so many things: temple, tomb, grotto, void, theatre; conservative/radical, establishing authority, continouosly unravelling'.. it collects and displays unique artifacts that are strictly controlled.  Note: this notion could also relate to the darkness of the cinema, considering here warhols movies..that is, the relationship between spectator and the screen, the film remains the same (koch p39), its time utterly dissociated from that of the audience...the image glows up there, stately and independent...even if one only glances at the image from time to time, it plunges one into a cinematic profundity (depth) the image effects a complete transformation of all temporal modes associated with looking at a movie'... 
to continue; white (p23) suggests that the museum is perhaps like a cinema in terms of the display of moving image work...further considered the entrance fee-Blockbuster exhibitions frequently 'sell out'...Preziosi and Farago (p23) describe the museum as a representation, objects are staged or framed to be read in various ways...moreover they suggest that the museum serves as a theatre, encyclopedia and laboratory and of performances..he questions could all be describing the conditions of a cinema? Kinomuseum then is an idea that remains in (white p26) in present tense, collects everything and nothing and is one place made up by many places. The museum becomes a cinema which offers different perspectives....and through selected artists, writers and curators programmes was to provide these different perspectives by constructing 'imaginary museums' to represent and explore the institution, that it the museum (note.not to remove) to bring collective imagination of the cinema audience rather than the authority representing one tangible (actual or real, able to touch) collection within the architecture of any edifice (building).

"Kinomuseum" examines and re-imagines the responses - and their cultural context - of both institutions to artists' work. Concerned not only with what we see but how we see it, the project proposes a radical alignment between viewing and critical thinking. "Kinomuseum" imagines a new museum rising from the foundations of the cinema auditorium.

Moving Pictures at an Exhibition 
Mary Kelly

'Fallout' conveys 3 films which involves moving spectator (moving from one theatre to another) and the still the image...Shelly Millner & Ernie Larsen Disaster (1976); Gregg Bordowitz's Fast trip, Long Drop (1993) and The Speculative Archive not a matter of it, but when...(2006). Kelly (p45) say's of the piece, 'the alternative arrangement was intended to engage the spectator performatively in the temporal sequence of events, so resembling a gallery space, where physical movement constructs an imaged discourse that is intertextual and simultaneous in time'. This is hard to discuss without viewing the images myself (not on Tubetube) its interesting that she later imagines her intrusion would ask the spectator to see the screenings in real time and then let them slip back into history reappearing in the present, but instead what occurred was the interaction that took place during the transitory stage where viewers displayed a sense of community, that is, ephemera of looks, sighs, shuffles and fragmented exchanges...further she later states that by 'watching the films (herself) she claims are close to the surface of everyday life ...the films propel us into the here and now, the moving image is retained, im memory, as a series of stills that cling to the past' Kelly (p47) notes Barthes ''brushed with death'' and the *Mulvey's technological shifts that over determine the psychic disposition (habit, routine) in the domain of spectatorship. 

*See Mulveys' stillness in the moving image: ways of visualising time and its passing' saving the image; Art after film, glasgow, centre for contemporary Arts 2003 

and now for POV...Screening Room and Death. Morgan Fisher 
(p85) Screening Room a remake by Volker Koster at the Gloria cinema, Oberhausen Film Festival in 2007 originally filmed by Morgan Fisher in 1968.

Fisher discusses one aspect of the film which he feels was not evident to him at the time, that being death!
(Again I am unable to view this film so therefore having to visually understand it through description given) Screening room is a tracking shot into the theatre where the audience is watching the film...every theatre where the film is shown requires its own version, so the film must be shot again and again-not remade. Despite showing in different places, the different shots are so to speak, duplicates of each other; that is duplicates of each other without anyone of them being original...further even though all shots are different from each other (even though each shows a different place) they have the same relation to the space in which they are shown, so all are one film. To discuss POV (point of view) he states: 'In a fiction film a point-of-view shot is the point of view of someone who lives forever, as a character in fiction does. But Screening Room is the point of view of the person who shot it, a real person, who unlike a fictional character will die. And by implication it's also the point of view of people who are watching it, and they will all die too. 

to add further he suggests that POV is what the character sees, we are required to see the character first and the eyes to the body of the character (pov only made possible because of the body). The character expresses reaction, shock, surprise, pleasure, disappointment etc etc. the act of the character looking makes us want to look at what he / she sees. Moveover, Fisher continues that our desire to see (what is viewed by the character) is satisfied by the cut to the second shot when we are given access. Example offered is 'Rear Window' (i have discussed this in a previous posting) James Stewert's pov shows him looking out from his apartment window onto a stage of interwoven narratives of people lives occupying the apartments opposite his...he is in a sense the camera (eyes) we see through his lens to what he wants us see, as discussed in previous posting in psychoanalytical terms also mirrors his own life.
To consider Fisher's point on death in his discussion, he claims that 'Screening Room is the point of view of the person who shot it, a real person, who unlike a fictional character will die. And by implication it's also the point of view of people who are watching it, and they will all die too.  To return to 'Rear Window' Stewert's character is immortal, we identify with the actor and the character he plays, thereby the actor is also immortal, so it is a shock to us when the actor eventually dies. Further he suggests that when the actor no longer works, their career ended (for what ever reason) they disappear. Career dies, they die too, the actor may live on, but they are as good as dead...years later the actor long forgotten finally dies for real...you can only die once, but the fact that the actors career has already died is a shock knowing that death has come twice.

Important to understand here...we know that James Stewert character is immortal (his pov being exclusive forever) and will live on, however the screening room the pov is not exclusive , it is a pov shared, even shared now cannot be shared forever as we will die also, the pov will pass on and so on.        

Extract taken from-http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/exclusive/morgan_fisher.php interview Melissa Gronlund


....You are doing an iteration of Screening Room, aren't you, your film that tracks into the cinema where the audience are watching it?
Morgan Fisher: That's correct. The camera approaches the theatre by a route characteristic of people entering that particular space. It enters the back of the theatre, which is dark and unoccupied. The projector is on but empty, so that it projects a rectangle of white light onto the screen. The camera slowly zooms into the rectangle until it entirely fills the shot, and we hold for a moment. Then we cut the tail off the end of the film, so that when it is projected there is a sort of cut, not from one shot to another, but from a picture of a screen of white light to that actual screen of white light. The film brings you to where you are sitting watching it.
In principle the film is very simple, and this means that I don't have to shoot it, I can describe it to someone else and they can shoot it. This is what happened at Kill Your Timid Notion: they shot it, and told me it turned out fine - although they had to use a different kind of film stock than in the past. It's getting harder and harder to find the right kind of stock - what used to be available as a matter of course is no longer available. It's important to shoot on film - there's a lack of forgiveness which demands precision - but there will come a point in 20 or 30 years at which it will be no longer possible, and I'm glad I won't be here to see it happen.
What about the wider infrastructure of cinema - the rehearsals, the shot types, the entry into the film theatre? That context has been as much a part of your interest as the materiality of film.
You're right. Yet in one sense Screening Room is very conventional. In a lot of my other films you see film equipment or other signs of self-referentiality. In Screening Room you don't see the apparatus of production, directly or indirectly, so the film's technical means are self-effacing, just as they are in conventional films. And the shot is a tracking shot, implying that it's someone's point of view; this contrasts with the tendency of the other films to show things in an impersonal way.
On the other hand, the film makes you aware of things that conventional films do their absolute level best to make you forget about. A good narrative film - and I love good narrative films - makes you forget the world outside that of the film, it makes you forget about the space you are sitting in, that you even have a body. Although the film is not reflexive about production, as many of my other films are, by making you aware of these things it is reflexive about the circumstances in which you view it. The film uses illusion to bring you to the space where you are sitting, a situation about which you can have no illusions.
When you gave a lecture accompanying Screening Room at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 2007, you rather movingly linked this awareness of the body to an awareness of mortality.
I had been asked by the curator Ian White talk about death in relation toScreening Room, and that is what I tried to do by talking about the case of the point-of-view shot. In a fiction film a point-of-view shot is the point of view of someone who lives forever, as a character in fiction does. But Screening Room is the point of view of the person who shot it, a real person, who unlike a fictional character will die. And by implication it's also the point of view of people who are watching it, and they will all die too.
Could you speak more about its site specificity?
Movies are expensive to make, but after the initial production the film is finished, once and for all. You make prints, which are not site specific. The relation between these two phases, a one-time initial production cost, even if high, and then the exhibition of many identical prints to recoup that cost - and sometimes earn it back many times over - is the economic model that underlies the film industry.
Screening Room is the exact opposite. The film shows the theatre where we watch it, which the title names, so you have to undertake the nuisance and expense of production for each new place it's shown. Yet the different versions are always the same film, because each has the same relationship to where it is shown.
To pursue what this implies, no prints can be shown on television. It's unimaginable to recoup the expense of producing the film in any one theatre, so the film flies in the face of economic sense, and considered in that light it is irrational, which I think is an important part of the film. So Screening Room is against the idea of film as a universal commodity and the model that the commercial film industry is founded on. This universal commodification was implied from cinema's beginnings, but then it seemed positive - people all over the world could have pleasure in seeing the same thing. Still, they had to make a commitment - going to the theatre at a certain time, for instance.
What I call a problem became explicit with the arrival of videotape, and accelerated with DVD and the internet. These have coarsened the experience of looking at a film. Now it's instantaneous and the cost is negligible. You've made so little effort to look at a film that you have no commitment to seeing it all the way through. Screening Room is absolutely against this model of the universal commodification of the moving image. You have to see it in a theatre.



    

Sunday 6 January 2013

Image, narrative and viewer’s perception


Plan to visit this month....

Light Show

30 January – 28 April
Light Show explores the experiential and phenomenalnature of light, bringing together sculptures and installations that use light to create specific conditions. The exhibition showcases artworks since the 1960s in which light itself is used as material to sculpt and shape space, often creating evocative environments and sensory works that operate at the edges of the viewer’s perception. Light has the power to affect our states of mind as well as alter our perceptions, and Light Show will include some of the most visually stimulating artworks created in recent years as well as rare works not seen for decades and re-created specially for the Hayward Gallery.
Artists in the exhibition include: David Batchelor, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flavin, Ceal Floyer, Jenny Holzer, Ann Veronica Janssens, Anthony McCall, François Morellet, Ivan Navarro, Katie Paterson, and Conrad Shawcross. The exhibition is curated by Cliff Lauson, Curator, Hayward Gallery.

And....
Project Space: Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear
Tate Modern: Exhibition
9 November 2012 – 17 February 2013

Since its birth, cinema has made a paradoxical demand on its viewers: to consciously suspend their disbelief. This remains a preoccupation for contemporary artists who have grown up exposed to an intense flow of still and moving images. The film and video works in this exhibition focus on the tension between image, narrative and the viewer’s perception. Together they expose the fracture between what we are shown on screen and what we see. Borrowing from various cinematic conventions, as well as formats including lecture, documentary, rehearsal and found footage, they examine the limits of our imagination and credulity. With a variety of approaches, their references move between the black boxes of movie theatres and the ‘black mirrors’ of our TV screens, computers and smart phones.
The exhibition blurs the boundary between depiction and deception and questions the logic of storytelling. Does the illusive charm of the moving image undermine its authority as a visual record? And what role does the viewer’s imagination play in constructing a narrative?

Really looking forward to seeing both shows...planning to view Friday 1st February (my 43rd bday!) before heading down to see family. last blog announced the prospect of me getting on with some literature review...well what do you think I have not contributed to anything...but hey don't despair Saturday 5th Jan has taken a turning point in which I have started to read again. The book is Kinomuseum. Towards artists' cinema. Edited by Mike Speringer and Ian White (I may have mentioned in a previous posting, not sure??) explores the relationship between cinema and the museum, White states (p23) that 'perhaps the museum is like the cinema not only in terms of the display of moving image work. like cinema ( often commensurate with it), the museum is no stranger to the entrance fee. Block Buster exhibitions frequently 'sell out'...however what is argued by contrast the museum collects and preserves unique objects, at expense with strict controls over dates and times, further it is a tomb, temple, grotto, void, theatre etc etc (allan Kaprow p140; where cinema audiences have collective ownership over the work in which each member pays to watch, in different countries, cities and times at a  duration..
im not sure where all this is leading too except another perspective into audience perception and another gap perhaps???...the museum a collector of things that watches on whilst we are merely passing through. the cinema a theater of moving image that as Kelly describes (p46).. screening an encounter in real time, and then sip into historical time as an image of the past reappearing in the present...Further Preziosi and Fargo describe the museum itself as a '' representation, an artifact as 'natural' as the 'specimens' it preserves'' (White) and museum objects are staged or framed to be read in a variety of ways...and serve as theatre, encyclopedia and laboratory, finally museums are perfomances...this also describes the conditions of the cinema...  

Has video art become obsolete? The Green Ray Tacita Dean

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/jan/23/video-art-in-the-vanguard
Feb 16th - to see Tony Oursler at Tate Modern