Event overview
The Department of Media & Communications' Radical Media Forum: Media Experiments, presents:
"The Drama of 3D: Ken Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern" by Michele Pierson
Ken Jacobs has been exploring 3D for over forty years. His stereoscopic cinema encompasses film, shadow play, digital video, and Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern performances. He stopped giving Nervous System performances in 2000 and now only travels to festivals, museums, and exhibitions to present the Nervous Magic Lantern. The Nervous System used two 16mm or 35mm film projectors capable of frame-by-frame advance (forward, backward, and freeze frame). The Nervous Magic Lantern, on the other hand, is a single projection device that works much like magic lanterns of old, throwing colored patterns on painted slides, or reflections of objects, onto a screen. What connects the different types of projection performance that Jacobs has pursued over more than forty years is not film, then, but a cinematic ontology (light, projection, and the moving image) and architecture (darkness, seating for an audience, and a large screen). Jacobs’ Nervous Magic Lantern performances are abstract dramas scripted, however loosely, for things to happen in the dark. They require the right architecture, the improvisation of live performance, and the participation of an audience. This talk will examine the participatory dimensions of Jacobs’ stereoscopic Nervous Magic Lantern performances, focusing, in particular, on Time Squared, which was performed over half a dozen times in Europe and the US in 2010-11.
Michele Pierson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (Columbia UP, 2002) and co-editor with Paul Arthur and David E. James of Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (Oxford UP, 2011). She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Accessibility of the Avant-garde: Drama and Abstraction in American Experimental Film and Media.
Radical Media Forum: Media Experiments
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Mar 2013 | 5:30pm - 6:30pm |
Accessibility
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