KEN JACOBS

The Pulfrich Effect. A dark grey filter is held before one eye, both eyes remaining open. The effect of the filter is a delay in the time it takes for the light that does pass through it to be signalled to the brain. One eye will now be seeing the image presently lighting up the screen while the other will be seeing the film-frame flashed a moment ago. It becomes possible to offer the mind, simultaneously, two distinct but related views of a scene. Complete stereopsis becomes possible, convincing 3D, true-to-life or anything-but according to how the two information bundles relate.

Each viewer of Bitemporal Vision: The Sea is offered a wand with truly magical properties. A filter on one end, it can be handled like a lorgnette. At the viewer's discretion it can be placed when wanted either in front of the left or right eye, either enhancing the depth character of the scene or - especially in the more abstract passages - entirely transforming depth character. Shapes suddenly appear or disappear, or radically reshape. Figure and ground trade places; direction of movement changes.

But the viewer, of course, is not being asked to simply make note of the changes: They're to be experienced, through intense and prolonged and empathetic observation.

The Nervous System consists, very basically, of two near-identical prints on two stills capable of single-frame advance and "freeze" (turning the movie back into a series of stills), frame by frame, in various degrees of synchronisation. Most often there's only a single frame difference. Difference makes for movement and uncanny three-dimensional space illusions via a shutting mask or spinning propeller up front, between the projectors, alternating the cast images. Tiny shifts in the way the two images overlap create radically different effects. The throbbing flickering is necessary to create "eternalisms": unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere unlike anything in life (at no time are loops employed).

I've said, "Advanced filmmaking leads to Muybridge." That's certainly true for me. Closing in on (to allow the expansion of) ever-smaller pieces of time is my personal ever-promising and inviting Black Hole. Actors' faces can stun me with boredom. (Movies are about actors.) I confess I feel walled in by human faces altogether, not as misanthropic reaction but because the human colonisation of human experience, in our urban lives, is so thorough. It is astonishing to find oneself here with so many others to chat with, but isn't this essentially a search party with our work cut out for us? We've gotten caught in the makings of our own minds and the only way out seems to be to enter into the workings of the mind. Film - as itself the subject of inquiry - is the spell we enter so as to pull apart the fibres of this phantasm, our opportunity to lay out the mind in strips. So, if picking at the texture of cinema, at the end of its filmic phase, seems about as inward as one can get, it's because the name of this digging tool I've devised, The Nervous System, also designates a main territory of its search, that place where we've blithely applied mechanism to mind, willy-nilly producing that development of mind known as cinema. After all, the micro and macro worlds are equally "out there". Fresh air rushes in from the core of things, too.