From This Side of Space to the Other Side of the Signal

• Benjamin Rosenthal

• SIGGRAPH Asia 2017: Mind-Body Dualism

Category:

• Sketch / Art Talk

• “from this side of space to the other side of the signal” utilizes footage produced on unique analog equipment from the early history of
  video during a residency at Signal Culture (a contemporary version of the original Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY), and emerges from a nod to Michael Snow’s iconic structural film La Région Centrale. Virtual landscapes pumped through the analog system become caught amidst sets of “meaningless” signs/barriers and violent signals. Computer generated bodies and body parts glistening with video material generated via this system perform actions that queer the line between digital, physical and analog, homoeroticism and violence––entangled in a fragmented high-modernist grid. A voice from the other side of the signal attempts to lure the viewer into some act of connection, of crossing over, only to be perpetually interrupted by barriers of interference. “from this side of space to the other side of the signal” is a two-channel piece that engages both the history of early video tools and contemporary forms of 2D and 3D animation. Using these analog tools as a way of addressing the historicity of the body, and as a way of defining the space of bodies (via their moving textures) in novel as a way of engaging our contemporary hybrid experience. Queering the distinctions between subject, object, transmission, physicality and the ephemeral larger questions about the nature of our technocultural existence rise to the surface.