Celluloid Film as Digital Art

Aesthetics of Translation, Information and Intermediality in the Works of Cory Arcangel

Abstract

The multidisciplinary artist Cory Arcangel questions the nature of contemporary representational strategies by exacerbating the rift between digital and celluloid images: Untitled Translation Exercise (2006) is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993) overdubbed it with voices of workers from an Indian outsource firm reading the original film’s script; Colors (2006) vertically outstretches each colour pixel constitutive of the cinematic image of a Dennis Hopper film resulting in a projection that resembles a Molinari painting; Structural Film (2007) is a 16 mm projection of a glitchy digital film that seems to be a “fake” avant-garde film.  These three works are explored through notions of translation, information, and intermediality that shed light on the zone of indiscernibility between celluloid and digital images by suggesting a concept of the image based on varying degrees of formal and abstract arrangements. With the help of thinkers such as Benjamin, Heidegger, de Man, Massumi and Deleuze and recent theories by Kalindi Vora, Carolyn L. Kane, Irina O. Rajewski, this paper maps out the intermedial haptic zone full of redundancies, pure information, scrambled codes and nontranslations.