© samantha krukowski Between Canvas and Celluloid Analectus Husserliana, Volume LXXXI

It is in the in-between that meaning is constructed. In the space between matter and the immaterial. In the dislocation between here and there. In the discernment of absence and presence. In the distance between an index and its referent. In the simultaneous recognition of a thing being mirrored and its mirror image. In the dividing line of a symmetrical subject. In the divergence of actual and virtual. In the distinction between physical and spiritual. In the transition between life and afterlife. In the intermission between live and recorded. In the difference between analog and digital. In the transfer (and transference) of a mark from one surface to another. Some months ago I was walking down a long, tall flickering fluorescent hallway and I came across a canvas rolling cart full of discarded 16mm film. Peering in and past the rim I found a tangled mass of two dimensional plasticized serpents made three dimensional in their endless winding patterns. I reached in and grabbed a handful. Some were bent, others had broken sprockets. Some were developed and when held to the dim light revealed imagery, others were black. There were strips of clear leader, sticky small globules of balled splicing tape, film fragments in various shapes. I took that handful back to my office, where I had a sewing machine. I dropped the thicket on the floor, pulled one strip out, and began to sew on it, passing over frames with stitches of varying types and lengths.

A student happened by just then and she breathed in, hand over her mouth. “Samantha,” she said in a hushed voice, “I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before.” Not being a filmmaker, nor someone well-schooled in the history of experimental film, I didn’t believe her. Since that day, I’ve looked into a whole host of filmmakers who have bleached, burned, painted, scratched, and otherwise directly manipulated film. But I haven’t found a single film that involved a sewing machine as an image-making mechanism. I have heard about a performance, the documentation of which I have not been able to locate, in which a woman sits on a stage and uses a sewing machine to sew film (without thread) that is simultaneously moving through a projector and being projected onto a wall. What I see of this performance is entirely imagined, though I love the idea of a sewing machine and a projector synchronized in their speed and operations. My student’s hushed voice interested me, and in retrospect I think her comment was aimed less at issues of originality than at a discrepancy relative to cinematic traditions. Film contains in secret...its imagery is revealed only with the application of light. Film comes, shot and developed or not, in long, opaque, glossy spools and its content, or lack thereof, cannot be perceived on its surface.

By sewing on film I was making stitches, dimensional marks and tactile accumulations that emphasized the surface of the film as a space of and for content. The imagery was on and through, not in, the film. The film strip on which I sewed became a space of registration for two distinct species subjected to an act of combination. Their juxtaposition created a fold and this is what my student perceived and the reason she spoke in a hushed voice when she saw it. Gilles Deleuze wrote a remarkable book entitled The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque.1 Divided into three sections, The Fold, Inclusions and Having a Body, this text has an immense scope and touches on ideas about infinity, elasticity, inflection, singularity, closure, texture, being, style, intensity, extension, corporeality, dust, calculus, harmony, melody and the unity of the arts. Deleuze’s work has been extremely influential for a generation of architects concerned with describing and designing what they term “topological architecture,” an architecture “characterized by techniques that produce the ‘deformation’ and ‘emergence’ of form.”2 In appearance this architecture is often curved and bent, in theory it embodies a “logic of curvilinearity and pliancy, which is capable of embodying in a fluid manner disparate elements and differences within heterogeneous continuous systems.”3 This is not an architecture conceived as a logical progression from given problem to solution, rather it is one made of “elastic bodies”4 whose interactions and effects themselves come to constitute the design process. My interest in the fold does not derive specifically from architectural practice, though I do practice architecture and I have studied the work and writings of those architects who keep Deleuze nearby. I am interested in the nature of the fold itself, and in some of its other manifestations. The fold is a relation, a space of transition, a well of multiplicity, a translator for interior and exterior, a reflection, a doubling, a pause, an emptiness. It contains the aura of infinity and the power of the void; it creates feedback loops and self-referential conversations. The fold won’t leave me alone. It lives with me in my studio, it insists that I pay attention to it. It has a particular habitat and I know what to do to find it. The fold lives in the space between media and in the transfer of information between analog and digital systems. When I work in my studio I am restless. I move between spaces. Big walls for big canvases. An alcove with computers and cameras. A garage with shop tools. An old chair and a rickety table stacked with books. A garden with cacti and a rooftop with flickering shade patterns. Moving between the spaces means moving between the modes of production / reflection they encourage. If I paint a particular mark or discover a formal relationship I sometimes want to express something about it in writing. I keep my laptop running nearby when I pick up a brush, so the latent potential for typing accompanies my paint-laden strokes. I used to worry about the blotches of color that were beginning to change the character of my keyboard. I’ve given up—paint simply wants to travel—and I accept and try to make something of the evidence of this materiolinguistic exchange. If I am working on the sequencing and tempo in a video, I discover frames in the composition that inspire graphic attention. I make it a habit of exporting these frames as still images, storing and printing them.

I keep a stack of these printed images nearby the drafting table where I do many of my drawings so that information derived from moving images can be brought to a halt and activated as objects. If I am building something the act of choosing and assembling parts makes me conscious (self-conscious) about the nature of development and the systematic or non-systematic way in which it proceeds. I document steps when they seem to be nodes of some kind. Keeping a record of these steps is part of the narrative of the object but also focuses attention on external narratives that inspire future objects. Moving between spaces means encountering the fold at different levels. The fold can be traversed in physical space. There is a well between my painting wall and my computer. What lives there? Recall Dante’s Divine Comedy5 and the imagery of the descent into hell.

Dante describes an inverted funnel, horizontally corrugated with ten deep grooves (bolge or valli) in which the various types of fraud are punished. There are (undulating) strips that run down the inside of the funnel like spokes converging upon a hub and these “correspond to certain sharp ridges of natural rock that traverse the circle, at intervals...These scogli, as they are called, form a set of embankments on which wayfarers—if such there be—may cross the circle without descending into the ditches. The only way to navigate the structure is to recognize the interdependence of the bolge and scogli and to mark a path that is high as opposed to low, one that avoids not just punishment but the punishment for deception where things are not as they seem. Dante’s bolge are spaces of indeterminacy. They contain proof of falsity, but not necessarily the evidence of truth. Those walking above, around and by them are shadowed by the spectre of what is not even as they may be unable to determine what is. This is the fold and the nature of its reflexiveness. Dante’s bolge or valli share some characteristics with this space of transition in my studio. What lives there is the potential for distraction and lost information, the denial of translation, the reluctance of the body, the failure of memory, the difficulty of reference, the escape of the subject. If there is nothing to take from one space to the other, if the content is a pretense or unworthy of transfer, then all is unmasked and I arrive where I am going with nothing in my pocket. I have been working on a series of paintings that are inspired by biological and cosmological imagery, the visibility of which is dependent on devices of magnification. When I first started studying this imagery, most of which is digitally produced, I was fascinated by how its content is essentially fished from the invisible.

Its existence points to an unlimited vision that can see in or out despite radical differences of scale and distances that can barely be measured. Yet I was disappointed by the quality of its representation and its plasticity. With all that complexity and depth of capture, something about this imagery was a one-liner: oh, look at what there is (!), or that is there (?), or there is that (.) I began to think about shaping some of this imagery using analog processes and constructing anew a surface, substance and materiality for it. Imagery that tends towards infinity (whether of the microscopic or macroscopic variety) inspires physical reckonings. Why? This is an inherently Deleuzian question: “…in order that the virtual can be incarnated or effectuated...is a realization in matter also required…?”6 The imagery that drives the paintings is simultaneously microscopic and macroscopic; compositions develop in the folds between these two extremes of perception. While a painting is underway, I photograph it at various points of completion, capturing it as a whole composition and as an agar on which particular forms or relationships are suspended. Zooming out increases the pressure of the surrounding context, zooming in increases the evidence of materiality and surface.

At either extreme the painting vanishes as a painting—it becomes one ordered object among many (losing its focus as subject) or it becomes unrecognizable, a dark background for the shine of its innards brought to light. In either direction, scale is distorted and extended into the world beyond the painting or into the world within it. Deleuze writes that “the macroscopic distinguishes perceptions...and appetites that are the passage from one perception to another...but [with] the microscopic...pricklings of anxiety render all perception unstable...every conscious perception implies (an) infinity of minute perceptions that prepare, compose, or follow it.”7 Perhaps there is anxiety at either limit since macroscopic and microscopic perception jointly drive the formation of new imagery. I had been at these paintings for about a year when I found that old film cart. It was inevitable that I would consider how the imagery of my paintings might become cinematic and what would happen if it did. I asked a lot of questions. How do you get from here to there? How do you get from a mark on a painting to a cinematic mark? How do you get from a cinematic mark back to a painting? What does a painting contain that can be taken somewhere else, and what are the ways in which it might be taken there? What is the nature of film such that it can receive painterly information, and what is its nature once it has received? How do you manage the shift back and forth from analog to digital and how do you respond to the pleats and bends along the way? Answering these kinds of questions meant attending to the marks and the media involved in the tranference and to the ways in which they might inform each other. I bought some clear film leader and sat down with it in front of my paintings. I began to draw some of the primary forms in the paintings onto the leader unsystematically and with a loose hand.

There was an immediate hiccup. I was looking at a big painting field and I was drawing on a long, thin strip of 16mm film leader. My source material was derived from a circumscribed object made with wood and absorbent cloth, covered with opacities of oil paint and oil medium and varnish; I was making marks on a continuous, mostly rolled strip of plastic with waterproof and mostly transparent inks. The painting was a single frame that contained multiple narratives, the film leader consisted of multiple frames, the treatment of which would determine the singularity or multiplicity of its narrative possibilities. Repetition in the painting was determined relative to composition; repetition of the forms transferred to the leader would determine the specificity of their kinetic relationships and their cinematic character.

And, knowing that film projects at 24 frames per second, the evolution of forms on the leader would have to occur at a very different pace and in a different way than those in the painting. Whereas the painted forms developed over and around and between, the forms on the leader would develop linearly, along and across. These observations began to change the way in which I thought about the painted forms and what might happen to them in the course of transfer. I switched modes. I turned my digital camera on the painting as if it were a compass; I looked for paintings within the painting, folds within folds. Deleuze writes that “perceiving in folds means that we have been grasping figures without objects, but through the haze of dust without objects…the figures themselves raise up from the depths, and that falls back again, but with time enough to be seen for an instant.”8 There was time enough to capture a few of these resurrections. I printed a photograph of the whole painting and cut it into sections that corresponded to primary forms and masses.

I placed these sections on paper and drew outlines around them, isolating distinct characters.

These notes made up a new icon alphabet derived from the painting but dissected away from it. I could write with these notes across the leader and posit my questions about sequence, score and cadence in their company, treating them as elements in a new language. I superimposed a grid on the print of the painting, then laid strips of leader across the horizontal divisions. I drew the positive and negative space in the painting directly onto the leader, using black and white marker.

These moves gave the painting frames that could be considered in relationship to the frames of the leader. The media were tending towards each other, their forms “…[arching] back to virtualities that they actualize in themselves…but yet again to possibilities that are realized in composite substances (thus perceived qualities), or in aggregate materials (things), or in extended phenomena (figures).”9 The leader began to absorb, reflect and extend the painting’s content while the painting’s content, represented and activated in another medium, began to change character. The images on the leader first became cinematic with the help of a Steenbeck machine, an old analog monster with dials and plates and spools and heads and a mirror / prism that catches and reflects imagery threaded through and passing by. A handle controls the speed at which the leader uncoils and recoils, and as images go by you can decide how much emphasis or action you want to give them. It is a remarkable thing to watch static imagery become kinetic, and to literally play the speed and duration and character of its recombinations. With a DV deck hooked up to the Steenbeck, I exported the (now moving) leader imagery into a digital editing environment. The experimental videos I’ve made using this method are the bloodstreams and galaxies and neural firings alive in and between the layers of paint on canvas. Still frames from these videos suggest new paintings; projecting these videos onto blank canvas suggests new choreographies for the body and hand of the painter. It is not a coincidence that Laurie Anderson wrote a song entitled Language is a Virus.10 Anderson is famous for engineering and playing a feedback loop in performances and using it as inspiration for equipment design. Three of her most famous instruments were the self-playing violin (a violin with a speaker inside such that one part of the duet Anderson played was on tape and the other part was her playing live), the tape-bow violin (a violin which ran prerecorded tape over heads mounted on the violin’s bridge) and the viophonograph (a violin with a battery-powered turntable mounted on the body and a stereo needle attached to the bow.) Most fascinating about these instruments is their capacity for performative doubling, temporal overlay and spatial disorientation. Here and there, then and now, machinic and human, action and reaction are all conflated. Anderson’s work streams out of the fold, full of sounds that escape cartographers, music that rewrites scores, all meandering in colorful but ephemeral vapors. Content and form, material and media are infectious. If you are, like me, unable and unwilling to avoid an oeuvre of multiplicity, you learn that every project is a seat of contagion. Working between media and processes creates a self-sustaining and infinitely generative conversation that moves through folds and and that “entails pulverizing the world, but also...spiritualizing its dust.”11 As the mythos of the digital fades, perhaps what we will come to discover is that any medium that denies reflection is doomed. We need only think of a vampire to remind ourselves that the thing that cannot be mirrored is that which does not have a soul. Endnotes 1. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 2. AD: Architecture and Science, ed. Giuseppa Di Cristina (West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2001), p. 8. 3. Ibid., p. 7. 4. Ibid. 5. Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, canto 18. 6. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque, 26. 7. Ibid., 87. 8. Ibid., 94. 9. Ibid., 80. 10. Track 3, disc 2 of The Laurie Anderson Anthology: Talk Normal (Los Angeles: Warner Bors. Records Inc. & Rhino Entertainment Company). 11. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque, 87.