Post-Cinema: 24fps@44100Hz

This piece, consisting of an acrylic painting (24″x24″) and an augmented reality (AR) digital-video overlay, is a collaborative artwork made together with my husband Shane Denson. It will be featured on the cover of the soon forthcoming book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film, which Shane edited along with Julia Leyda, and it will be on display at The Carrack Modern Art gallery in Durham, NC from January 15-23, 2016.

For the painting, I started with a photo that I took of our dog Evie lying in front of another of my paintings, Glitchesarelikewildanimals!No.1, which itself was based on a digitally glitched (databent) picture of Evie. I subjected the new photo to a similar process, first turning it into a video in a nonlinear editing program (Final Cut Pro) and then deforming the video by sonifying it in an audio editing program (audacity).

You can see the resulting video if you scan the painting with the augmented reality app Wikitude (downloadable for free on Android and iOS). In Wikitude, simply search for “Post-Cinema,” and you’ll see the video overlaying the painting, along with a second textual layer of generative text. These sentences, generated in real time by means of a Markov chain algorithm programmed by Shane, are computationally cobbled together on the basis of word frequencies occurring in the text of the Post-Cinema book. Together with the digital video, the physical painting, and the mixed space of augmented reality, the text fragments prompt us to reflect on the materialities and temporalities of post-cinematic media.

If you download Wikitude on your phone or iPad and scan the image above, you can even experience the work right here on the screen. Just remember to search for “Post-Cinema” in the app.

Of course, the best way to view the work is in person, so if you’re anywhere near the Research Triangle, be sure to drop by The Carrack Modern Art gallery in Durham, where Post-Cinema: 24fps@44100Hz will be on display from January 15-23, 2016, as part of the annual Winter Community Show.