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Each change, of one of these factors, is already an expansion of the contemporary practices of cinema. But going further, ‘On the level of the material display of the image many new techniques are also in development … materials which can be new sources of light and colour. New lenses …. which contain information as a temporal code … and in general a change from refractive to diffractive optics.’

Combining 35mm film with video, computer and web based works is one way in which this can be seen as expanded or exploding cinema. The other is through the exhibition formats. The works are projected onto multiple screens, televisions or computer monitors, on walls, roofs, floors and even mirrors, using moving projectors, mobile screens, unfolding frames - controlled by the palm, finger (touchscreen), control knobs, dials, mouse or other pointing and sensing devices, or even by the voice. Interactivity is a crucial aspect of these works.

You have to actively negotiate both the meaning and form for yourself. And as the curatorial statement clarifies, the intention is not a totalitarian spectacle that overwhelms and belittles the viewer, rather it is an inspiring manifestation that affirms each viewer a unique position and critical relationship to the representation.

In another exhibition titled ‘Fast Forward’ held in 2003-04 at the Sammlung Goetz Museum, one of the largest private collections of media art in the world, the work was less about cinema and more about video in its own right.

To enter a darkened chamber with huge images projected on all three walls was an experience in itself.

The content was in a sense irrelevant. One could feel absorbed and contained within a world of images and sound. In fact, the sound track on headphones only added to the dream like quality. The images could also be watched without the sound track. You could also remove it and watch the images silent. You could enter and exit at will. You could sit, stand or walk along the screens.

Another spectacular experience was the dark dome like chamber with a revolving projector mounted on a centre stand. By using a control knob the frame could be opened in any direction. Everywhere was image! It was exactly like being in a planetarium only you were looking up into earth/human life. Like looking at modern day cave paintings, digitally enhanced.

If one were to speak of the grammar of this video, it seemed to me it is the mid-shot that had been abandoned. Video was eloquent with necessary details and also equally evocative of the panoramic, especially in the installation format where an image was both enlarged and multiplied.

The nature of the ‘cut’ also seemed to have changed. It was no more about construction, of painstakingly moving from shot to reaction shot, shifting distance, axis, point of view, to present a whole, but to fragment, dislocate and interrupt. For along with expanding space, installations also open up huge vistas of time.

This is the medium of the unstructured narrative unfolding at leisure, in uncontested time. The whole is taken so much for granted that it is in fact never reached. In certain works, because the narrative forks at crucial points, with each pathway that you choose to follow you abdicate others, and will never know the whole. Even if you physically explore each pathway, there is still no way of reconciling the different storylines. That is not the intention.

The installation form is not new but digital video has given it a new legitimacy. To me it seems to open up a world of real and conceptual possibilities. In non-fiction one can now truly privilege process, use documentation not merely to archive but also to re-render, to unravel and de-mystify. In fiction, the non-linear achieves default status.

(The author is an independent filmmaker based in Chennai)

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