www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/indefinite-visions/
A two-day event bringing together academics, film-makers and artists to explore the indefinite and the illegible in film – from artists’ film and video to experimental film and commercial cinema.
Light, motion, definition, compression: the conditions of recording, storing and screening moving image works are subject to constant variations that pull them away from perfect visibility. Film-makers and artists often seek out and work with the resulting visual uncertainty, from the warping of space to the melding of senses; speed to slowness; darkness to glare; and blur to glitch.
Indefinite Visions explores the possibility that an important function of moving image is not to show but to obscure, and that – like the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up – the closer and deeper we look at an image, the less clear it becomes.
Each day includes a variety of screenings on film and video, complemented by an evening programme at Close Up Film Centre. Evening screenings bring together recent examples of indefinite vision in experimental film.
The event is curated by film-maker and theorist Richard Misek and film scholar Allan Cameron, and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. An edited anthology entitled Indefinite Visions (eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit) will be published by Edinburgh University Press in late 2016.