Screening the digital.

Last September I attended the inaugural D.FILM/Digital Film Festival in New York City, an event held at The Kitchen on two separate nights. in November, the festival moved on to other locations, including San Francisco and San Diego; and in the spring it will travel to various other cities throughout the United States and abroad (Ed. note: check http://www.dfilm.com for schedule updates). This impressive schedule of upcoming venues suggests that d.film, a constructed term the festival organizers use to indicate digital film, has the potential to influence a variety of producers and viewers, both in this country and abroad. Its ability to do so arises less from its own reputation that, given the newness of the media, has yet to be defined and more from the exhibition space within which d.film made its debut.

In his brief introduction at the start of the festival, Bart Cheever, the chief producer-curator of the show, reminded the audience of the Kitchen's important historical role as a showcase of ground-breaking artistic work. In 1971, Steina and Woody Vasulka established the space, dedicating it to the exhibition of video art. Since then, the Kitchen has been a leader in introducing new media to New York City audiences. It has also influenced the founding of other sites and the programming of other festivals. Because the space was so instrumental in promoting video art, it is appropriate, Cheever argued, that now, 26 years later, the Kitchen should launch d.film's entrance into the art world.

Cheever's comments are somewhat ironic since the very space that opened its doors to early experimental video art is now exhibiting work that all but signals the end not only of such analog-based media, but the exhibition space itself. In many respects, however, d.film's bid to edge out '70s and '80s video art arrives too late. Conversely, its ability to herald the end of such alternative spaces as the Kitchen is a little premature. Nonetheless, the Digital Film Festival was a benchmark event; the work in the festival clearly confirmed that digital media has an exciting future.

As expected, the festival played to a packed audience. Like others around me, I laughed at Paul Kevin Thomason's Billy Ray Shyster's House of Discount Special Effects and Animation Emporium (n.d.). Our laughter, however, abruptly turned into an uncomfortable silence. Although Thomason's opening piece and his The Green Man (n.d.) easily stole the show, Kristen Lucas's Watch Out for Invisible Ghosts (n.d.), a nostalgic re-evaluation of early video games, and Paul Vester's Abductees (n.d.), a visually complex yet inauspicious interpretation of alien abductions, wandered aimlessly through long and underdeveloped scripts. I began to shift nervously in my seat, and noticed others around me doing the same. Confused, I began to fumble in the dark for my copy of the program notes.

The Digital Film Festival, as the art-poster that accompanied the program explains, showcases "low budget films made with computers and other radical new forms of technology. This includes non-linear editing systems, 2-D and 3-D computer animation, digital camcorders and more." In support of this description, the poster also included individual write-ups on each of the 19 shorts in the exhibition. These write-ups promised a wide variety of engaging works. Several artists used "high" art as their source imagery. In Hamlet (n.d.), Andrew Bellware reworks segments of Shakespeare's play and, in Hopper (n.d.), Tom McClure layers fictional characters on top of scanned in images of Edward Hopper-style paintings. Others investigated the world of animation: In The Adventures of Waterbong (n.d.), also a feature on the d.film festival website, Eric Rosner creates a cartoon figure in the shape of a pot pipe. In one rather humorous scene, the character attempts to negotiate with a Turkish immigration official. In Live Nude Girls! Episode 10 (n.d.), Matthew Clark and Mason Nicoll use existing footage; they splice together various genres of anime (Japanese animation), from children's cartoons, to action features, to softcore pornography. Following a different direction altogether, Raquel Coelho bases her The Tapir (n.d.) on a Brazilian myth; in brilliantly colored animated sequences, she recounts the Tupari Tribe's explanation of the origins of the Amazons. Together, these works form an interesting blend that explores high and low art and investigates many forms of Western and non-Western culture. Rather than emphasizing this aspect, however, the program stresses the artists' choice of equipment and software. It is here that my confusion arises.

To produce their pieces, individual artists chose from a variety of video and film equipment. These include digital and high-8 video as well as super-8 and 16 mm film. Depending upon the individual's accessibility, each artist selected from a variety of computer software and hardware ranging from Premiere and Photoshop to Alias, and equipment spanning from Macs to SGI workstations. As a result, the program reads like a "how-to" guide, listing a variety of applications and platforms that prospective digital artists could use to produce similar images. The problem is not the technologically informative descriptions, but the program's misleading definition of the term "d.film."

The artists in the festival all exported their computer-manipulated footage not to film, but to video. Hence, the media specified in the title of the festival is deceptive. I was, however, willing to overlook this detail and started to re-evaluate my own presuppositions of the media and began to consider other possible meanings of the term, "d.film."

It quickly became apparent that Cheever and those in the festival were self-consciously using the term d.film; they were less invested in the mode of projection and more involved in the technology used to construct and manipulate the image. As such, the title of the media implies that as applications and programs develop the output of the work - the physical manifestation - will become irrelevant. The tools used to alter the image and prepare it for export are of greater significance. In the future, artists will be able to send innovative special effects directly into interactive multi-channel environments and to publish experimental single-channel sequences instantaneously onto websites. In the present, however, the d.films in the festival were neither sent to such artificial environments nor posted, save for a few quicktime clips on the festival's website, to such communication systems. (These clips proved to be more obstructive than communicative; it took my Power PC over 60 minutes to download the images.) Thus, even stretching the festival's designation, its use of the term "d.film" - already in Internet syntax - can only be seen as an expression of great anticipation, an expression that nonetheless leads the curator, in the program notes, to ask the poignant question: "What happens when powerful filmmaking technology falls into the hands of artists and non-filmmakers?"

Undeniably, d.filmmakers' access to powerful ground-breaking applications and equipment leads to some very innovative results. While the artists in the festival use relatively low-end equipment, their explorations of special effects rival many of the breakthroughs found in large-budget cinema. In relation to video art of the 1970s and '80s, their experiments, however, are not that revolutionary. Similar to d.filmmakers, early video artists investigated the boundaries between "high" and "low" art; they incorporated "found" or appropriated media imagery into their work; they layered and composited various source images together. In fact, Nam June Paik, one of the first to bring the video medium into a gallery setting, continues to explore these very issues in his recent work. In Cyberforum (1994), for example, Paik morphs presidential election photographs of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George Bush and Bill Clinton into a continuous video loop. In doing so, he suggests a loss of distinction not only between presidents, but between political parties. Paradoxically, it is this very idea of a loss of distinction that the Kitchen's exhibition most addresses.

D.film's premier forum is not so much about a new media standing in the place of an older technology (many of the d.filmmakers use this very technology as a source material component), but the status of video art, in whatever flavor - digital or analog - in culture today. In the 1970s and '80s, video artists often explored special effects that were for the most part too expensive and time consuming in other media. Since the 1980s, composite images, multi-dimensional depictions and morphing have permeated all aspects of mass media. Films such as Virtuosity (1995, by Brett Leonard) and The Fifth Element (1997, by Luc Bresson), TV shows such as The X-Files and Voyager, and commercials such as R/Greenberg Associates' ad for Shell Oil and Blue Sky Productions' M&M's Celebrity Campaign all use special effects to seduce viewers. The influence of these visual lures extends far beyond the entertainment industry; they have become the window through which mass media frames world famous figures and the structure within which the viewer participates in broadcasts of newsworthy events.

The producers of Contact (1997, by Robert Zemeckis), for example, inserted digitally-altered news footage of Clinton into several scenes. In doing so, they suggest that a global icon such as the President of the United States has become an avatar or, worse still, clip art. As such, he can be inserted into a spectrum of media publications. While for some, this may be an amusing comment on Clinton's shifting persona and political agendas, the world of make-believe now, to a greater degree than in the past, shapes our perception of reality. This development has alarming consequences.

Newscasters often broadcast computer-enhanced footage of catastrophic events. In late August 1997, newscasters zoomed in and cleaned up a portion of the video surveillance tape taken at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. In a bizarre replay reminiscent of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), images of Princess Diana, her lover and chauffeur were endlessly broadcast on every news station around the globe. Viewers could interpret the events that led up to the Princess's death. In doing so, newscasters produced a sense of immediacy and participation; those of us glued to our sets in disbelief could pretend we were participants in the investigation or guests on a find-the-hidden-clue game show. Hence, the broadcasts were only a few steps away from realizing sci-fi fantasies such as The Running Man (1987, by Paul Michael Glaser): in a bizarre twenty-first-century game show, the audience bet on a contestant's ability to survive a rather brutal obstacle course.

It is in this milieu of immediacy and participation that d.film emerges. D.film comes into existence in the very era when the boundaries between reality and fiction, viewing and participation are becoming increasingly unstable. We are at a point where these ideas can, to some extent, be reshaped. It is this notion that d.films such as Vester's Abductees, begin to address, but does not go far enough.

In Abductees, Vester produced a visually stimulating image track. After meticulously going over all the descriptions, I was most taken with this piece; the artist, as the program states, took live video footage, blew it up on a Xerox machine and then repegged and reshot the images. The result proved to be an exciting, grainy, yet dense surface. Each segment became a spatial grid. Rather than exploring aspects of this grid, playing with the boundaries that separate front from back planes and manipulating the distinctions that define "real" and reproduced images, Vester stopped short and wove his intricately layered surfaces into a traditional storyline. Given the inherent non-linear aspects of his working process, it is curious that Vester and so many other d.filmmakers in the festival were so invested in telling a linear story. This is not to say that they should not do so, but it seems that traditional film and analog video are better suited to this type of exploration.

If d.filmmakers are, as Cheever states in the November 1997 issue of Wired, attempting to reconceptualize Hollywood cinema, they need to rethink their strategy. Their low-end experimental shorts too closely resemble Hollywood productions. As a result of their dependence on storylines, d.filmmakers' evocative works looked more like demo reels. If these artists want to produce work for industry that is their choice. If they want to create work for an art audience, they could learn much from video art; video artists of the '70s and '80s understood the critical potential of the technology and demonstrated this knowledge in their work.

D.film's strength is precisely its digital technology. As Frank Popper has stated, digitizing alters the nature of the image. It becomes an architectural idea, "a space to visit, to explore in various ways. Editing . . . has been replaced by a scenographic concept." In other words, rather than a static 2-D surface, all images have entered the "twilight zone" of a fourth dimension. They have become not cinematic, but architectural spaces. Artists are no longer limited to explorations of either 2-D surfaces or 3-D narrative space. They can explore scenographic space. Here, the cinematic edit and Hollywood suture fall by the wayside. The scene moves - becomes animated - through layering and compositing. Rather than static spaces that produce the miseen-scene for the story, the relationship between incidents within each grid becomes the defining factor. The artist can explore multiple ideas and themes in one single segment.

In Wired, Cheever states that it is "not hard to conceive of a time when you can shoot a film, edit it in your living room, put it up on your server, and anybody who wants to can stream it." He argues that technology is merely a tool of the artist. Technology, however, is neither a passive instrument nor a transparent device. It is pertinent to remember that computer technology, the web and virtual reality all arose from military experiments done in the United States in the 1950s. Power is not just about accessing a tool but also, hidden with that tool's implementation, are ideas about control and manipulation. Hence, the technology already presupposes these notions. The artist's choice of programs to alter the image and his or her decision to post it on a particular server matters, and this is where d.film could become most subversive.

D.filmmakers could stress less the "film" in d.film and more the "d." In Internet language, "d" signifies sites that invite users to post their comments and participate in discussions. Rather than art as commodity, d.filmmakers could promote art that is less about reception and more concerned with engagement.

Unlike traditional artwork that must be scanned in and, through its conversion from analog to digital form, loses some of its detail, digital artists can submit and display directly onto the Internet. My point here is less that scanning affects various media in distinct ways and more that digital artists bring to their work a different mind set. Usually, artists using object-oriented media, from paper to canvas to stone, conceive their manifestations as finished work. Digital artists posting their work onto the internet can move beyond these boundaries. They have the opportunity to publish works that can be altered, reposted and/or deleted. In this way, they could break radically from older concepts of audience reception, to even a greater degree than Dada performances in the 1920s and mail art of the 1970s. In a Baudrillardian manner, their artwork could become transgressive not because of its content and discourse, but simply because users can immediately respond to it. It is this aspect of the medium that has the potential to change our very definitions of art, artistic production and reception. If artists can move past copyright concerns, d.film has the capabilities of not only breaking down traditional boundaries between artist and viewer, but cultural barriers between East and West, North and South. Because digital work on the Internet can easily cross international borders, recipients anywhere can respond to such work. D.film, then, has a potential to penetrate a larger audience where meaning has less to do with content and more with response. Hence, meaning or agency is not absent; it occurs in another form. It can be about a manipulation of the very power codes of control that are hidden within the medium itself. Or, rather than exploring these and other exciting possibilities, d.film could simply maintain itself as a poorer cousin of film and a more enhanced relative of video art.

BARBARA L. MILLER, a critic and scholar based in Palisades Park, NJ, is writing a study of postwar culture and American art and cinema.