Abstraction Today 

Henning Engelke (Art History, University of Arts Linz)

“Zones of Activity”: Abstraction, Digital Culture, and Analog Experimental Film

Materials and technologies are closely entwined with the aesthetic practices, meanings, and values of experimental film. In fiction films and documentaries, materials and technologies mostly serve to represent things, produce images, and tell stories. In experimental film, on the other hand, they are integrated into artistic practices and the process of creating aesthetic, political, and social meaning. For a long time, analog, photochemical film has played an important role in such practices, and it remains central, even at a time of rapid technological change, for the identity of experimental film culture. This is particularly evident in attempts by filmmakers to create abstract, non-representational, or non-objective imagery. The first part of this paper traces how analog film and filmic abstraction were entangled across changing media historical environments. I will argue that in films by John and James Whitney, Hy Hirsh, Harry Smith, and Stan Brakhage engagement with the material properties of analog film simultaneously evokes imaginaries of the digital, undermining rigid distinctions between the two fields. In the second part of my presentation I will focus on recent analog abstractions by filmmakers such as Jennifer Reeves and Tomonari Nishikawa to consider the role of the analog in the present digital culture. This includes reviewing questions of technological obsolescence and innovation, material agency, and the importance of analog film for eco-critical cinema within traditions of filmic abstraction.