Design in Film Exhibition - Block Museum, Evanston

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 30, 2017 | permalink |  |  

I will be attending a day-long conference that is to help organize the 2018 Designers in Film exhibition at the Block Musuem of Art in Evanston on October 5. It looks like a great exhibition and I'm glad to see they will be publishing a catalogue to accompany it. The exhibition presents the work of Chicago-based design firm, Goldsholl Design Associates, (Morton and Millie Goldsholl and the associates affiliated with their firm) showing these practitioners’ extensive impact on design and film nationally from the 1950s through the 1970s.

image: Millie Goldsholl, Morton Goldsholl, Wayne Boyer, Larry Janiak, and Dick Marx, Still from Kimberly-Clark Corporation “Fortune and Faces,” 1959, 16 mm film, 12:48 minutes. Mort and Millie Goldsholl Collection, 1942–1980, Chicago Film Archives.

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 30, 2017 | permalink |  |  

Historical cinema has a specific concept of its audience as passive, challenged by semiotics and postcinema. The semiotic view of audiences proposes an idealized, hypothetical ‘typical viewer’ who employs established lexical expertise to follow and embrace the established conventions of encoding/decoding. This viewer is precisely the “complicit” or ‘passive audience’ assumed in historical cinema and critiqued by politically engaged theories of media. These “traditional” viewers accept and employ, rather than challenge or interrogate, their use of established conventions. Although these conventions are historically concerned/used for the presentation and elaboration of narrative forms, these ‘typical viewers’ employ them to engage any media work that might invoke or suggest them, either through their formal organization—as in the still photographs of Cindy Sherman, or through the use of a familiar kinetic medium such as video, or the animated GIFs used on webpages.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published September 30, 2017 | permalink |  |  

The Miami Rail is running a tribute. This is my contribution.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published July 25, 2017 | permalink |  |  

The convergence of immaterial digital processes and the physical world is an increasingly obvious part of everyday experience, and has been steadily getting more attention since the start of the twenty-first century. There is nothing new about this relationship, which has been developing since at least the 1980s, but what is of interest is how these developments have stopped being “new” and simply become a part of everyday reality, accepted and largely ignored as just an aura of the digital. The variety of terms attempting to name these developments reveals the different approaches and concerns of the people introducing them: as challenge, as celebration, as philosophical shift.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published July 24, 2017 | permalink |  |  

I recently read my copy of Vendela Grundell's book, Flow And Friction: On The Tactical Potential Of Interfacing With Glitch Art and was pleasantly surprised to see my critical framework for considering 'glitch art' being applied to a new area, web design. I would be interested to see her analysis applied to media works as well, rather than just publications, but I can see the importance of art history working with web media. I am glad to see more work being done on the convergence of glitch processes and tactical media.