Twelve Live Performances by the Filmmaker, Including New York Premieres of Two
New Works: Coupling (1996) and From Muybridge to Brooklyn Bridge
(1996)
September 20–22, 27–29, 1996
Cinematic pioneer Ken Jacobs will give twelve live performances of his unique
work at The Museum of Modern Art. The series, "The Ken Jacobs Nervous System,"
will run on consecutive weekends: September 20–22 and 27–29.
For more than forty years, film artist Ken Jacobs has explored the cinematic
experience in unfailingly innovative ways. His lifelong project has been the
aesthetic, social, and physiological critique of projected images—images that
by turns lull or assault the viewer as the artist manipulates them. Jacobs
investigates the rarely examined territory between 2–D and 3–D in his ambitious
Nervous System pieces, two of which will receive New York premieres.
In the Nervous System performances, the visual detail and historical and social
significance of Jacobs's found footage is richly observed through the
filmmaker's skill as projectionist-performer. Jacobs has invented a specially
designed system of two analytic stop-motion projectors, equipped with a
spinning exterior shutter. Identical films are projected slightly
asynchronously, creating stereoscopic effects that alter conventional
perceptions of space and time. Jacobs has described the hypnotic, strobelike
eruption as "the tremorous relationship of stills, producing scenes of uncanny
movement and depth."
"The Nervous System brings a pair of stop-motion film projectors into a kind of
congress," Jacobs says. How the machines respond to each other and what issues
forth is determined by hairline-precise shifts of alignment orchestrated by
Jacobs as the projectionist-performer. Frames are held, arrested in their
respective paths of light, as the spinning exterior shutter alternates and
melds the cast images, producing impossible changes, both subtle and violent.
Ken Jacobs' Nervous System film performances include XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX
(1980), Bitemporal Vision: The Sea (1994), The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell (A Flicker of Life) (1995), and Loco Motion (1996). Also
performed are a Magic Lantern work entitled Chronometer (1990), and the
New York premieres of Coupling (1996) and From Muybridge to Brooklyn
Bridge (1996), which includes two new 35mm films, The Georgetown Loop
(1905/1995) and Disorient Express (1905/1995).
"The Ken Jacobs Nervous System"was organized for the Museum by Jytte
Jensen, Assistant Curator, and Joshua Siegel, Curatorial Assistant, Department
of Film and Video.
