Thanks to Gareth Evans, I recently came across Chris Petit’s reflections on and responses to the digital revolution and its impact on the way we experience the world and art – the explosion of the image bank, fragmentation, flattening and ubiquity, memory, experience and attention, the rise of sampling, recycling and post-production.
“The Museum of Loneliness (MoL) was founded a couple of years ago as a non-institution dedicated to working in the gaps, and positioned at the opposite end of dot com. No website, no facebook, no twitter, MoL is essentially a parasite working through other bodies. It is not particularly lonely either, in case you were wondering. The loneliness refers to its founding observation that modern life’s primary relationship is no longer human but with the screen – actual and psychological – making everywhere connected and unconnected, lonely and not lonely at the same time.
When the digital revolution exploded the image bank, it placed us in a state of what could be called post-cinema. Cinema, like popular music, used to be something to be kept up with but everything has fragmented and flattened out, leaving it both more accessible than ever and at the same time – given the impossible, proliferating backlog – unknowable. Hence the fashion for specialisation and the growing prominence of the curator: those experts and brokers of taste, which remains the misguided be-all and end-all…”
The full article can be read here.
And there’s a related interview – We Are Analogue – with Chris and Rachel Bowles for The Skinny at the 2014 Glasgow Film Festival:
“The Skinny: What is post-cinema how does it relate to the Museum of Loneliness? How did the idea come about?
Chris Petit: With the technological revolution that’s been going on over the last 15 years, the whole image bank has exploded. We’ve moved into a different kind of way of thinking about visual images, it’s a kind of second stage, and there are two parallel movements. There is one that breaks images down into fragments like YouTube and then there are these marathon events from the art world where everything is made incredibly long, like Christian Marclay’s exhibition, The Clock, which was a 24 hour montage film set to real time. As far as the Museum of Loneliness is concerned, it’s kind of a conceit, it is not a real thing. It’s founded on the principle that today our primary relationship is with the screen, it’s not really with each other anymore, it’s with different kinds of screens; both the psychological screen and the real screen of the computer screen. Somewhere in all of that comes the idea of post-cinema. The other phenomenon that is happening now is the progression to the next stage: the idea of cinema’s memory. It is how cinema is remembered. What certain writers have been pointing out for quite a long time is that you don’t remember films in the way that you see them, you only remember fragments. These fragments build up into what could be called cinema’s memory. So somewhere within that the concept of post-cinema lies. I would say it was, it is, more an idea than a theory…”
The full interview can be read here.
A fragment from a lecture Chris delivered as an introduction to his work Lee Harvey Oswald’s Last Dream at the 2014 Oberhausen Film Festival:
“This is not about that fashionable subject, death of cinema, but is about the ‘after’ of something, a shift which is probably too early to identify yet, other than by hairline cracks. I am curious to know exactly when cinema as I understood it ended. Because something has passed, not only in the obvious transitions from film to tape and from analogue to digital. There’s a more personal history…’