CURA.

Lenard Giller: The feature length film Productions consists of 360 found images (from a 1982 Panini sticker album) which I scanned and reinserted inside the exact time frame in which they first appeared in Disney's 1950 Cinderella. The timecode and soundtrack both mirror the duration of Productions while simultaneously highlighting the passage of time and the reduction of content. It's important to title both the timecode—Timestamp (107232)—and the soundtrack—Soundtrack (01:14:28)—so it's clear we're talking about three individual works which exist in relation to each other but could potentially also be shown separately. 

LG: It highlights the negative space...in the context of the sticker album, it's complete, but in the context of the film it is highly incomplete. So there's a complete object within a durational time frame making it seem entirely incomplete. Even though it's actually a condensed 'full thing'.

LG: I think what it's doing is highlighting the passage of time and the reduction of content. But the sound does also highlight the moments in which there is content. It's like a push and pull. 

LG: Yes, there is a soundtrack that exists from start to finish, but parts of that soundtrack are conceived to be background noise, white noise. It's designed so that you notice it when you walk in and you notice when you walk out: something that creates an atmosphere but you're not so aware of it while it's playing/you are still immersed in it.

LG: To us they belong together because we are used to seeing images alongside sound but, technologically, they are two different things (or let's say within the evolution of technology). At first there were silent movies and the film camera was not able to record sound at the same time. Early cameras were loud: powered by a motor or hand-wound, the noise of the camera would drown out any other sounds. As cameras became quieter over the years the sound recording accessories were added to moving image equipment. 16mm was an obvious choice for the first iteration of Productions because it's inherently a silent medium. To me, its silent nature relates it more to photography.  There are two elements at play: the idea that it's silent and the idea that there is no movement between the images because they are static stills. In an animation or a movie there is movement because the images, placed in a sequence, create movement. My images are static, and this makes it more of a photographic work than a moving image work. I like the idea that it's a photographic work within a time based container. 

LG: I like to say that I work with time rather than with moving image. I consider the durational aspect of the piece and then I place static content within that container. The other way I like to work is by having a fixed camera and one static shot: the camera is still and whatever is in front of it, moves. It's a type of a long exposure, a kind of photograph. I'm thinking about my more recent works DreamWorks and Actors. 

LG: That's also why I don't want to become a filmmaker and why I have no interest in cinema or theatre spaces. I have an interest in exhibition making and time based work because it exists durationally and can be accessed whenever one feels like it. I'm drawn to the concept of reflexive as opposed to consumable time. Consumable time is when duration is preconceived and something is consumed from start to finish and where an exchange happens (for example: an exchange of money). Reflexive time is a self- constructed duration: you're not a client, no exchange is taking place and you have free will to come and go as you please.  If you're a filmmaker showing work in a gallery context you run the risk of the work being consumed the same way as it does in those other applied practices: from start to finish. I try to emphasise a conceptual point by making work specifically for a gallery or museum context in which, most of the time, it's accessible for free and people can walk in and out as many times as they want. Even though Productions is a work that is feature film length, it's not meant to be consumed like a feature film...one can spend an hour or two minutes in there.

LG: Yes because I think Productions is a work that relates to conceptual works from the 1960s and 1970s where, yes, I was the one executing the work but it's really about an idea and this idea can be understood in five minutes or in an hour. If someone decides that they want to experience the installation for longer, then they can.

LG: I've definitely been thinking about attention spans and how the contemporary consumption of culture is generally fast paced. There's a tension in the work between flashes of images, which is similar to, let's say, an Instagram story, and a build-up that is exactly the opposite, a build-up that is drawn out. I'm influenced by conceptual and minimal art—the idea that minimal art is reductive—getting rid of content to focus on a container and highlighting the formal qualities of an object. I think that's really clear in Productions. I am looking at the materiality of film, at nothingness...that's the minimalist aspect.  And then the influence of conceptual art becomes clear in the way I placed the images and how a subject enters a minimalist container. I don't want to go on too long about minimalism, but what minimalism did was to confront the viewer with something that wasn't consumable in a linear fashion. I want to make time-based works which confronts the viewer like minimal sculpture. 

LG: I think it's also interesting to look at when this film came out: in the 1950s, Cold War USA. It was the time of post-war American glamour, of Marilyn Monroe. The cultural industry in the United States tried to remove any signs of labour in whatever it produced: let's say a Disney cartoon has a lot of hand-drawn labour in its production, but its surface appearance is slick. It was a decisive moment—industry trying to get rid of any artisanal trace—you can see this in minimalism too. 

LG: Yes, there was a huge amount of work in cutting the film physically but it's hidden inside a slick container.

LG: What the 16mm projector does is to materialise the passage of time both through sound and through the film material being pulled through the machine, by the machine. So in the moments in which there are no images, you see the celluloid moving and the roll spinning and you have the sound which suggests that something is operating, happening. You are aware of something not being static and the viewer is physically confronted with the passage of time. This was the conceptual starting point for thinking about how to translate an analog work into a digital one. What we came up with together is to look at the components of this work and build three separate channels. We have the entity of the moving image, a feature length film comprised of 360 images (Productions) which, in its digital form, exists as a silent film. Another entity is the audio composition, which tries to do something similar to what the sound of the projector did. It is mostly white noise—a sound that you are aware of but it remains in the background —similar to the sound of digital machinery rather than analog. And in the moments where an image flashes on screen there's also the synchronised sound of the voices from Disney’s Cinderella, playing intermittently within the wider score composed of white noise. The third entity refers to what was originally seen in the 16mm version: the spinning roll of film. In the digital version you have timestamps synchronised with the images, playing on a Sony Cube...again this relates to the other two works, but can also be seen as a separate work. The timestamps visually illustrate the passage of time. 

LG: When I was making Productions, I was also following a philosophy of language course with Paolo Virno in Rome. Amongst other things, Paolo Virno is a great scholar of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht and we were reading The Storyteller by Benjamin. Here, Benjamin describes how we lost our ability to tell stories and he discusses the fairy tale and the Brothers Grimm, the idea of an oral history passed on generation after generation. He looks at how stories change through oral dissemination. I was interested in the history of fairy tales: how they have travelled and how they have changed over time.  So now, back to your question. With Virno I was also looking at how Benjamin wrote about his friend and colleague Bertolt Brecht's writing from the same period. Benjamin wrote a review of Brecht's writing in which he describes Brecht's modus operandi as being similar to an industrial one: where human traces are lost. I think all these things I was reading came together with this work. I was thinking about style of production in writing, in commodities, in literature...plus the added subject of the fairy tale and The Storyteller. Around that time I found these images which were made in the 1950s but were reproduced for the Panini sticker album in the 1980s. So 30 years later. That, to me, is an example similar to that of orally transmitted stories changing over time. I realised that the story of Cinderella has essentially stayed the same over the past 80 years but its imagery has evolved with technology, becoming flatter and flatter. 

LG: I think every image undergoes some form of metamorphosis. So it’s a hybrid of sorts, an analog or digital film with the surface appearance of a printed image. I looked through the time-line of Cinderella to find the corresponding time-stamp of the 360 still images from the sticker album...to decipher where each image existed. Out of all the images I found, only one was mirrored. It is the image we used for the invitation. I don't know why but on the sticker the dog jumps from the left to right and in the film it jumps from right to left. It's a sort of glitch I guess. 

LG: What I'm doing is creating a transfigured version of a pre-existing work and translating it into different media. I like the idea of the version and the idea of mutation— I don't really see my work as being fixed anyway. That's also a reason why I chose to separate the channels: I want the film, the sound and time itself to exist independently from one another. If I want to change the sound, I can just change the sound. I don't have to change the other two elements. There's an element of control there too—I can also decide to just show it silent and it's still conceptually round—I can just show the sound or I can just show the timestamp, they can work together but they don't have to. There's curatorial freedom for the future in the separation of channels.