Instant Cinema is a comprehensive platform for experimental film, video and computer art, making the best audio-visual work of artists of all generations available to a worldwide audience.
For many years, experimental films and art films were almost exclusively screened in museums and at film festivals. Instant Cinema aims to compensate for half a century of under-exposure of film/video and computer art by exhibiting some of the great classics of recent history, side by side with the work of today’s most talented media artists.
To maintain the highest possible degree of quality, Instant Cinema membership is by invite only. Every participating filmmaker receives five invites that can be sent to other filmmakers or artists who, in turn, have the opportunity to invite five more new people.
Currently, Instant Cinema is in beta. We welcome all feedback at info@instantcinema.org.
All work posted on the site requires the permission of its makers and/or copyright owners. Click here for full terms and conditions.
Credits
For many years, experimental films and art films were almost exclusively screened in museums and at film festivals. Instant Cinema aims to compensate for half a century of under-exposure of film/video and computer art by exhibiting some of the great classics of recent history, side by side with the work of today’s most talented media artists.
To maintain the highest possible degree of quality, Instant Cinema membership is by invite only. Every participating filmmaker receives five invites that can be sent to other filmmakers or artists who, in turn, have the opportunity to invite five more new people.
Currently, Instant Cinema is in beta. We welcome all feedback at info@instantcinema.org.
All work posted on the site requires the permission of its makers and/or copyright owners. Click here for full terms and conditions.
Credits
Instant Cinema is an initiative by filmmaker Rene Daalder and EYE Film Institute Netherlands in association with designer Folkert Gorter.
The site’s system architecture is developed by Joshua Pangell and is powered by the Cargo platform. AV Production: Aaron Ohlmann.
Instant Cinema is made possible in part due to the financial support of the Mondriaan Foundation.
Introduction by Rene Daalder
Instant Cinema is conceived as a permanent home for film, video and computer generated art, which, despite their inherent capacity for multiplication, have historically suffered from a chronic lack of audience exposure. In fact, since the invention of the movies, more than a century ago, artistic films have struggled to establish their legitimate place in the art world.
Even today, there is no single term that encompasses the niche artists have been carving out for themselves in the context of the audio-visual media. The term art film, for example, is specifically reserved for independent feature films. To confuse things even further what is generally called ‘film/video art’ is scattered into an absurd number of sub-categories, a sampling of which can be found here.
As the technical offspring of photography, which had its own troubles to qualify as a formal art form, the moving image was initially considered even less artistic. Photography was at least preceded by centuries of representational paintings, but the sprocket technology, transporting a series of consecutive still frames to give the impression of movement, created an illusion of actual “reality” rather than an artistic interpretation of the world around us.
As a result, filmmakers and historians who wanted film to be perceived as an art form began to look for cultural analogies that would add to the medium’s artistic esteem.
Early Hollywood films that introduced drama to the screen were referred to as “canned theatre;” the Russian avant-garde equated the camera to the human “eye;” and the pioneering proponents of the “auteur” theory (like Alexandre Astruc) would urge filmmakers to use the mechanical apparatus “the way writers use a pen.”
Generations of experimental filmmakers in America stayed close to the familiar art forms of their time. Taking his cues from animation, Oskar Fischinger presented his “motion paintings” as visual counterparts to music, inventing a genre that would come to be known as ‘visual music.’ (Still from the film Kreise by Oskar Fischinger, ©Fischinger Trust)
Stan Brakhage created abstract art by scratching his images directly on the celluloid, while other members of the ‘New American Cinema’ movement credited modernist poets like Ezra Pound as their main inspiration.
Adopting an intelligence and subtlety that had before been the exclusive domain of the traditional arts proved to be an effective strategy as a growing number of filmmakers in America started to distribute 16 mm prints of their movies to colleges across the country, much like mainstream movies. But even though they succeeded at elevating their medium’s artistic pedigree, the world’s museums kept banking on the exclusivity of the singular sculpted and painted art works that to this day make up most of their highly valued collections, whereas the film medium was invented for mass duplication and can be projected anywhere. To impose a similar sense of uniqueness to the audio-visual media, museums often resorted to the longstanding strategy of framing films by containing them in ambitious “installations.” Such framing devices are supposed to lend dignity to the otherwise unruly art form while keeping the works as far removed as possible from their populist roots.
As different kinds of film stock were invented other formal conventions of the art world were imposed on the moving image whereby technical aspects (like grain structure or contrast) of different formats like Super 8, 16 and 35 mm film were somehow formalized in a similar vein as painterly techniques, i.e. oil, gouache or aquarelle.
Since scarcity has always been the key to the monetization of art, the emergence of the video format, which exists exclusively in the ephemeral sphere of electronics, proved to be even more anathema to the priorities of the art world. Gone were the tactile qualities of celluloid as the mediation of technology increasingly prevailed. Worse yet, the electronic medium could now be duplicated right in someone’s living room!
But in time video too would spawn a creative subculture of its own, particularly since it could be manipulated in unprecedented ways by the likes of Nam June Paik or Pipilotti Rist.
In the 1960’s, Gerry Schum, an enterprising German cameraman who shot classic films for such stellar artists as Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, Gilbert & George and many others, finally took issue with the museum world’s in-hospitability towards the moving image and made a bold move by solliciting the electronic mass medium of television to showcase his seminal films.
To everyone’s surprise he succeeded to establish what he called his TV Gallery. But after only two broadcasts he found a note on the door of his office, reading: “Anyone who talks about art here will be shown the exit.”
Faced with the prospect that his collection would once again be banished to the seclusion of galleries and museums, the thoroughly disillusioned and debt-laden Schum ended up taking his own life. As it happens, forty years later most classic masterpieces of film/video art are still lingering in obscurity. Entire genres (i.e. Visual Music) are mostly unknown by the public at large, even when the work was made by world famous painters like Kandinski or celebrated animators such as Oskar Fischinger.
In the 21st Century, a new mass medium has emerged and the next generation of time-based art is exploding on the Internet. Once again, there is controversy among a large segment of the art world, wondering if time-based art has a place in such a populist environment.
Motivated by the firm belief that scarcity is no longer an option, Instant Cinema takes sides with Gerry Schum as we set out to show as many classics as we can side by side with the most talented emerging artists of today, exposing film, video and computer art to the broadest possible audience in a respectful context of which Gerry Schum would have approved.
RD ’11
The site’s system architecture is developed by Joshua Pangell and is powered by the Cargo platform. AV Production: Aaron Ohlmann.
Instant Cinema is made possible in part due to the financial support of the Mondriaan Foundation.
Introduction by Rene Daalder
Instant Cinema is conceived as a permanent home for film, video and computer generated art, which, despite their inherent capacity for multiplication, have historically suffered from a chronic lack of audience exposure. In fact, since the invention of the movies, more than a century ago, artistic films have struggled to establish their legitimate place in the art world.
Even today, there is no single term that encompasses the niche artists have been carving out for themselves in the context of the audio-visual media. The term art film, for example, is specifically reserved for independent feature films. To confuse things even further what is generally called ‘film/video art’ is scattered into an absurd number of sub-categories, a sampling of which can be found here.As the technical offspring of photography, which had its own troubles to qualify as a formal art form, the moving image was initially considered even less artistic. Photography was at least preceded by centuries of representational paintings, but the sprocket technology, transporting a series of consecutive still frames to give the impression of movement, created an illusion of actual “reality” rather than an artistic interpretation of the world around us.
As a result, filmmakers and historians who wanted film to be perceived as an art form began to look for cultural analogies that would add to the medium’s artistic esteem.
Early Hollywood films that introduced drama to the screen were referred to as “canned theatre;” the Russian avant-garde equated the camera to the human “eye;” and the pioneering proponents of the “auteur” theory (like Alexandre Astruc) would urge filmmakers to use the mechanical apparatus “the way writers use a pen.”
Stan Brakhage created abstract art by scratching his images directly on the celluloid, while other members of the ‘New American Cinema’ movement credited modernist poets like Ezra Pound as their main inspiration.
Adopting an intelligence and subtlety that had before been the exclusive domain of the traditional arts proved to be an effective strategy as a growing number of filmmakers in America started to distribute 16 mm prints of their movies to colleges across the country, much like mainstream movies. But even though they succeeded at elevating their medium’s artistic pedigree, the world’s museums kept banking on the exclusivity of the singular sculpted and painted art works that to this day make up most of their highly valued collections, whereas the film medium was invented for mass duplication and can be projected anywhere. To impose a similar sense of uniqueness to the audio-visual media, museums often resorted to the longstanding strategy of framing films by containing them in ambitious “installations.” Such framing devices are supposed to lend dignity to the otherwise unruly art form while keeping the works as far removed as possible from their populist roots.As different kinds of film stock were invented other formal conventions of the art world were imposed on the moving image whereby technical aspects (like grain structure or contrast) of different formats like Super 8, 16 and 35 mm film were somehow formalized in a similar vein as painterly techniques, i.e. oil, gouache or aquarelle.
Since scarcity has always been the key to the monetization of art, the emergence of the video format, which exists exclusively in the ephemeral sphere of electronics, proved to be even more anathema to the priorities of the art world. Gone were the tactile qualities of celluloid as the mediation of technology increasingly prevailed. Worse yet, the electronic medium could now be duplicated right in someone’s living room!
But in time video too would spawn a creative subculture of its own, particularly since it could be manipulated in unprecedented ways by the likes of Nam June Paik or Pipilotti Rist.
In the 1960’s, Gerry Schum, an enterprising German cameraman who shot classic films for such stellar artists as Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, Gilbert & George and many others, finally took issue with the museum world’s in-hospitability towards the moving image and made a bold move by solliciting the electronic mass medium of television to showcase his seminal films.
Faced with the prospect that his collection would once again be banished to the seclusion of galleries and museums, the thoroughly disillusioned and debt-laden Schum ended up taking his own life. As it happens, forty years later most classic masterpieces of film/video art are still lingering in obscurity. Entire genres (i.e. Visual Music) are mostly unknown by the public at large, even when the work was made by world famous painters like Kandinski or celebrated animators such as Oskar Fischinger.
In the 21st Century, a new mass medium has emerged and the next generation of time-based art is exploding on the Internet. Once again, there is controversy among a large segment of the art world, wondering if time-based art has a place in such a populist environment.
Motivated by the firm belief that scarcity is no longer an option, Instant Cinema takes sides with Gerry Schum as we set out to show as many classics as we can side by side with the most talented emerging artists of today, exposing film, video and computer art to the broadest possible audience in a respectful context of which Gerry Schum would have approved.
RD ’11
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