Guffwatch - 'nonprojections'

March 2 2015

Image of Guffwatch - 'nonprojections'

Picture: Tom Bisig/Basel

Video art has at last found its equivalent to the blank canvas. A new exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York by Paul Chan shows projectors wirring away, but there's no actual film to see. It's a 'nonprojection'. Or, as the Guggenheim website states:

Nonprojections (2013–) [is] a body of work comprised of video projectors and jury-rigged, power-conducting shoes that are connected by specially designed cords. Although the projectors’ lenses flicker and strobe as if outputting videos, there is no corresponding surface on which imagery might appear. Holding their contents within, these would-be projections remain illegible phantoms, replacing a passive experience of moving images with one that Chan characterizes as “inner-directed, like the ghostly visual impressions that one conjures up in one’s mind when reading a good (or bad) book.”

'Holding their contents within...'

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