Isil Karatas

Analogue filmmaking has been experiencing a revival with the proliferation of artist-run film labs especially in Europe, even though it has been declined “dead” many times throughout the last decades. With a DIY approach to mostly Super8 and 16mm filmmaking, “retro”, “out of date”, “archaic” equipment and machinery are “rescued” and still in use in these spaces. Concerning the materiality and technique-orientated expressions, the practice of (experimental) handmade film involves multi-sensorial dimensions of auditory, tactile and olfactory/gustatory perceptions during the making off of films. My ethnographic research in the independent photochemical film labs of Filmkoop Wien and Labor Berlin focuses on the diverse sensorial and affective forms of relationships between human and non-human actors. To grasp the modes of sense-making with the (audio)visual recording technologies in the complex media ecology of today, I explore the collective care and engagement for the film and its machinery, individual associations with the tools and agency of the equipment during production and projection as analytical categories with cultural and anthropological perspectives. To represent the multi-sensorial modes and emotional landscape of this film practice in a richer and less textual sense, I will engage with my field (sound) recordings during the presentation.    

Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszak

In 2016, new media artist Tamás Waliczky began working on a series entitled Imaginary Cameras. With this series, Waliczky was selected to represent Hungary at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The computer graphics, which depict 24 precisely constructed fantasy machines (cameras, projectors, viewers), reverse the widely held trope that newly invented devices change our ways of seeing. Instead, Waliczky argues, an inventor’s vision and worldview often predetermine the mechanisms of the apparatus and the character of the images the device can create. Among the 24 devices envisioned with these images, there are several with mechanisms that refer to 19th-century and 20th-century cameras which strove to expand the limits of photography’s two dimensionality by creating stereoscopic and immersive images, but Waliczky’s versions often add other dimensions to the equation, such as time. The Stereo Flipbook Viewer allows the viewer to see an analogue animation in stereo, while the Orthographic Camera, which has a multitude of tiny lenses in columns and rows, gives the photographer a chance to record a scene in a way that will show the image without any distortions from an axonometric perspective, in other words, in a manner we are familiar with from digital 3D design software. The Panorama Camera records a 360-degree view, not by merging views taken sequentially, but rather through a special mechanism which records the immersive image in one instant, without any time passing. Thus, Tamás Waliczky’s analogue machines reflect the inventor’s way of seeing, since the decades- old new media art practice of creating virtual and augmented reality has influenced the kinds of images his devices are capable of creating.

Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák is currently the Head of the Budapest Gallery, Budapest History Museum. In 2019, she was the curator of the Hungarian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. Her areas of interest range from mid-19th-century photography to contemporary art.

Aida Ferreira

The Portuguese Center of Photography has several stereoscopic collections and archives at its disposal. The archives of Aurélio da Paz dos Reis, Alberto Marçal Brandão and César Moura Brás are some examples of the use and exploration of this technique. Other international authors, like Adolphe Block, are represented in collections such as the Coleção Nacional de Fotografia (International Photography Collection), Alcídia e Luís Viegas Belchior or António Pedro Vicente. The perception of depth using artificial form made this technique one of the most common means in the society of the 1920s and 1930s.