Ruptures in the Reel

The similarity between motion picture cameras and projectors is such that if a projection booth is adequately darkened and unexposed film is run through a projector, light illuminating the theater will enter the projector lens and expose the film. 35mm film projectors used this way will record the objects and space before them, exposing the relationship between two fixed elements in the cinema: the projector and the screen. In "Projector Obscura", the lens, which is normally responsible for casting out so many images, is given a chance to take in light and reflect upon its theatrical space, and the screen is given a chance to stand bare.The theaters recorded in this project are the Biograph, the Gene Siskel Film Center, Anthology Film Archives, Gateway, MFA-Boston, Coolidge Corner and Harvard Film Archive.

Through the process of contact printing, hand processing, and low-fi optical printing, Gossamer Walls remembers, mis-remembers, and reinterprets a previous generation’s super 8 home movies.

"How do you find what you don't know you're looking for ?"

Dear Projectionist, after these opening credits, please remove the lens from the projector for the duration of the film. Thank you in advance. (Peter Miller)

Unlike traditional video, or double-mirror feedback, this Polaroid doesn't reference the infinite extendibility of a single moment, but rather it reverse engineers the collapsibility of many moments into one.

'Eidola' references an early intromission theory of vision, that all things emit tiny versions of themselves into our eyes. That theory competed at the time with the emission theory, that the eyes themselves emitted light, which emerged from the eyes and sent back to the mind what was seen. In this piece we see through eyes that emit an infrared light to which the raw film is insensitive while touching the camera's retina with an external light which it can 'see'. We move from the un-lensed eye along the film path (optical nerve) into the magazine containing the film in the process of its exposure (the mind). As we do so there is a growing lapse between the performed light and the moment we see it in the video because we are traveling further from the 'eye' (memory).

A boy and a girl expose a quantity of film to a constellation of fireflies, making a cameraless portrait of bioluminescence. This is what the world might look like to a firefly, from birth to death. This film was not made with a lens. It is a self-portrait of fireflies.

It does! This film is from Panacea, a cycle of "useful films".

Peter: …So Eva, I have this camera here. It’s an old point-and-shoot 35 mm camera… and I was thinking maybe we could play a camera game together… / Eva: So, what’s the game about?

Mirror exercises in the woods.