From: Pip Chodorov (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Jul 05 2010 - 16:21:36 PDT
The best text about this was written by Stefano Masi, "Peter Kubelka:
Sculptore del tempo" and published in Bianco e Nero A. XLV, n. 1
(Rome January-March 1984) and reprinted in Peter Kubelka, Paris
Experimental 1990, translated and edited by Christian Lebrat.
In it, Masi explains the context in which Kubelka shot 60 meters of
film for a beer commercial, chose several short shots, only a few
frames each, and had these shots printed in loops to make strips of
film 1440 frames long (27 and a half meters of 35mm) running one
minute. There were four strips of short shots repeating, call them A,
B, C and D, and four more strips which were the same in negative,
call them A', B', C' and D', plus a strip of black leader and a strip
of transparent leader, all one minute long, and all ten were
stretched across the floor of his studio. Following his score, he
chose pieces of one strip or another. If he used the first three
frames of one shot, he would start on the fourth frame of the next,
etc. The score combined simple formulas which led to a complex
structure such as ABAABBAAAABBBB and alternating negative and
positive in the rhythm AABBCDEEFFGH. Overlying this structure of
images was a wave of black which would supercede any image, and which
followed the structure 16-8-4-2-1-2-4-8-16-32-16 etc, the number of
black frames being followed by the same number of non-black frames.
Finally there is a crescendo of red, applied during the printing
step, in which a red filter was used during 30 frames but separated
by decreasing gaps of non-red frames in the rhythm
110-110-110-110-100-90-80-70-60-50-40-30-20-10. There are more
complexities, as well as errors, in the system and if you're
interested you would do well to find the article.
Arnulf Rainer is more complex. It is built of 16 large units of 576
frames each (that is 24 squared), each of which are composed of
"themes" lasting 288, 192, 144, 96, 72, 48, 36, 24, 18, 16, 12, 9, 8,
6, 4 and 2 frames and exploring all possible permutations. Because
there are 2 possible permutations for one frame (black/white), 4
possiblilities for two frames (black/white - black/black -
white/black - white/white), eight possibilities for three frames,
etc, for only 24 frames there are already 4096 possibilities. For
this reason, Kubelka applied esthetic criteria to choose which of the
perumatations would be used. The basic elements or microstructures
are based on the permutations of 1, 2, 4, 8, 12 and 24 frames, built
up to the 576-frame-long large units. This goes for the image
(black/white) as well as for the sound (silence/white noise [the
white noise was provided by Pontus Hulten of the Moderna Museet in
Stockholm]). The sound follows its own similar structure alongside
the image; they rarely coincide light with noise, black with silence.
I hope this brief explanation helps. I am only paraphrasing the
books. Much more detailed information is available if one searches.
-Pip Chodorov
At 0:42 +0200 6/07/10, Lundgren wrote:
>Do you have a reference for this?
>I'd love to see the rules.
>
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