GODS BROWSER_02

GODS BROWSER_02 from Geert Mul on Vimeo.
Gods Browser
Interactive installation
Geert Mul 2011
Version 01 developed at Baltan Laboratories
Eindhoven 2010.
(thanx to James Wright for filming)
Scopic fiction in database times
In the sixties land artist Robert Smithson was interested in the idea of sedimentation, stressing the temporal character of basically all things, and artifacts in general. This insistence on the temporal nature was expressed poignantly in his groundbreaking essay ‘A sedimentation of the mind : earth projects’ (1968). In this text he writes : ‘Poetry being forever lost must submit to its own vacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustion rather than creation. Poetry is always a dying language but never a dead language.’ Geert Mul’s treatment of the cinematic form is somewhat similar in the sense that in his redefinition of this archaic artform he has brought it to its bare formal properties : still images assembled in a lineair temporal order.
But by using the abundance of found still imagery on the internet and putting those in a temporal order, thus creating the illusion of movement, he harks back at the advent of early cinematic forms that were created with the help of the Zootrope, Praxinoscope, the Phenakistiscope, and other ninetheenth-century pro-cinematic devices. In those early days of machinic vision cinema could be defined as photography with a motor; a device that ‘animates’ still imagery into a dynamic presentation.
Yet in the case of Geert Mul’s retake of these ancient techniques, the images he uses are assembled and grouped together by software that analyses the harvested images of the internet by an abundance of characteristics and catagorises them in an ever growing database of ‘similarities’. The millions of images that are assembled in this machinic fashion and distributed into a dynamic presentation belong to an altogether different semiotic register than images that function within regimes of ‘representation’ and ‘signification’. These images show the register of what is called by Félix Guattari as  ‘a- signifying semiotics’ (such as money, analog or digital machines that produce images, sounds and information, the equations, functions and diagrams of science, music, etc.), and that bring into play signs with a potentially symbolic or signifying effect, yet have a machinic rather than a symbolic or signifying effect in the way they actually function. Thus on the one hand these images trigger actions, work, constitute the input and output elements of a social or technological machine while on the other hand they produce meaning, representations, discourses in which the subject recognizes him/herself and at the mean time is alienated from him/herself as an effect of these conflicting semiotic regimes. In Mul’s work this implicit conflict lies at the heart of his investigations.
For although using contemporary technological means and reflecting on the current status of images, Mul has tried to construct a cinematic ‘narrative’ based on an overview of the database patterns of the collected data (images). This new type of ‘narrative’ oscillates between these two semiotic registers. By applying an automated selection protocol, he has shifted the focus of his attention towards the formal qualities of the millions of images he has used for the work, while at the same time he has delved into their potential to create a ‘narrative’ that presents the machinic logic of their origin. This given forces the viewer to constantly shift the perspective withwhich the stream of images is understood, or given ‘meaning’. This quality resembles the quality of the classic avantgarde cinema, that also exerted this mesmerizing effect or what the Russian avantgarde artists called ‘ostrenanie’, a sense of alienation.
With this intentional alienation Mul seems to point to the deep changes that have occurred in the way that images function and exist in our contemporary digital culture. In these times the databases of the globe are the new museums of symbolic debris that potentially can instruct us to perceive a virtual world of images that lies beyond what meets the eye. Mul has made his cinematic effort for this highly exciting scopic adventure.
Willem van Weelden, april 2011