RRH Videoworks

2003

RRH: Ross Rudesch Harley Videoworks, double DVD with 48page catalogue, published by MediaComPress in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2003.

Limited edition x 300 signed and stamped

booklet1a.pdf

Disc One

Roadblock (1988) 15min
Beauty and the Beat (1988) 07min
Lone Wolf and Cub (1988) 08min
Dead End (1988) 07min
Before Endless House (1989) 30min
Men of Character (1990) 03min
Futuropolis Now! (1990) 03min
The Big Picture (1990) 02min
Ride (1 991) 03min
Endless House (installation) (1992 ) 03min
Immortelle Installation (1992) 09min
…………….
90min

Disc Two

The Digital Garden (installation) (1992) 05min
The Digital Garden V3 (Installation) (1993) 04min
The Green Machine (installation) (1993) 03min
CountThirty (1993) 12 min
Woman in Room 32 (installation) (1994) 04min
Drive: Motion Landscapes (1994) 22min
Drive: Motion Landscapes (installation) (1995) 03min
The Forgotten Adventures of Krezy Kat (1996) 01min
Quien es? Que es? (1997) 11 min
Cardoso Flea Circus (1998) 08min
Convicts (installation) (1999) 04min
Motion Landscapes (1999) 35min
Chicken Face (2001) 01 min
CFC @ MCA (installation) (2002) 03min
…………….
116min

Riding The Loop

text by Gillian Fuller

“…riding in a history in which millions have
learned to look while they are moving,
and move while they are looking.”
Motion Landscapes, 1998

The medium is motion

Channel-surfing TV the other night, creating my own montage from gritty
urban dramas that dominate the weeknight 9:30 slot, a little landmark
stood out among the broadcast landscape of crammed city streets, emo-
tive close-ups and closing doors. It was a documentary on renowned
dynamic architect, Santiago Calatrava. Interspersed with images of his
open and fluid buildings were shots of natural rock formations precariously
positioned, cornstalks bending in the breeze, and the curious shapes of
shells and flowers. These images seemed to suggest that for Calatrava the
possible is real and that it resides in the world of the actual. ”Can space
change like a tree does?” asks Calatrava.

The world is constant becoming, movement, change and instability. How
can the static objects of architecture work with the discontinuities of
continual change? How can architecture deal with the structural poetics of
movement?

In Brian Massumi’s latest book, Parables of the Virtual, he suggests that
movement and sensation have been conceptually bracketed out in cultural
theory in favour of those particular intellectual paradigms where notions of
mediation have been concerned with the gap between matter and systemic
change. The body and its movements have been rendered inert and dumb
in a system of ideological interpellation. In this system, the body doesn’t
move: it is placed conceptually in static discursive paradigms - a gendered
body, a racialised body. In this schema mediation is movement. Or put
another way, most existing concepts of mediation obliterate the need to
think about movement.

And yet we live in a world where movement (particularly technologised
movement) is a major urban organiser, where highways and TV dominate
and change the perceptual landscape: the light of motion; the ‘stacato im-
ages’ of the road; the blur from the roller coaster; the half light of TV; and
the darkness of cinema shed light on new perceptual realities. In so doing,
they make new realities a possibility. Distances collapse, time becomes
malleable and speed spins categories of perception and reality off the
tracks, so to speak, into new dimensions and alternative circuits.
There is alot going on in Ross Rudesch Harley’s collectioin of Videoworks,
and in the spirit of recombinant art that dominated his early videos, I will
assemble a thesis of the workings of these videos of cars, rollercoasters,
horror movies, and more by sampling.

Shot 1. Dead End (1988)

This is an aerial shot lifted from eighties noir film To Live and Die in L.A.
The shot tracks the passage of a car along the dense network of L.A. high-
ways. As the camera films the car from above and behind, the world looks
‘familiar’: the car moves along a highway that recedes into the distance
according to the laws of classical perspective. However, as the camera be-
gins to catch up to the car and eventually overtakes it, perspective slowly
changes in strange ways. The highway no longer stretches out toward a
distant horizon, but moves vertically up the screen. As Virilio might note,
the landscape of the mind is confounded by the landscape of the eye. In
the final movements of this shot, the apparent horizon of the classical per-
spective gives way to something altogether different - endless movement
that seems to loop off the screen and toward the viewer.

Shot 2. Drive (1994)

A tracking shot, this time longitudinal, taken through the windscreen of a
car as it moves along the stark landscape of a snow-lined highway. As this
long continuous shot unfolds, the landmarks of the roadside architecture
such as swirling KFC buckets and generic service station restaurant signs
appear and dissolve through the windscreen. The landscape looks North
American, yet the car appears to be driving on the left hand side of the
road. This little discontinuity between place and vision is intentional as the
footage is actually playing backwards and reversed - shot through the rear
of a van while driving right. This trick of motion-capture creates a sense
that this road could be anywhere.

Shot 3. Ride (1991)

This is found footage, a lateral tracking shot taken from a rollercoaster at
night. The movement is so fast that landscape is a blur of light and barely
discernable shapes.

E-motion

Motion capture. It’s a term that many film and videomakers find distaste-
ful. It seems to reduce the art of cinematography to a point-and-shoot
technological practice. I like the term, precisely because it reinvests the
technological back into aesthetics and in so doing allows transdisciplinary
connections to be made to cinematography. Pressing the record button on
the VCR, driving a car, or even shooting the holiday on mini-DV are also
forms of motion capture. The continuities and discontinuities of all these
forms of capturing motion seem to be fundamental questions that Harley
asks. In his work, motion capture is an analytical method and a productive
practice.

In Motion Landscapes (1999) Harley shares a “primal memory” of gazing
out the back window of the car, hypnotised by the motorised world unfurl-
ing behind him. “Staccato images, superimposed reflections, rhythmic
sounds and fleeting sensations offered by an enchanted landscape end-
lessly flashing past my window”.1 Watching one of Harley’s earlier works
Ride, I find myself similarly mesmerised. Ride is a deceptively simple
work. Seven shots sampled from found footage of a rollercoaster ride are
digitally processed with sepia and solarised filters, overlaid with a fleeting
and rudimentary animation of oscillating lines, set to a sparse soundtrack
of dub-style beats and simple looped guitar chords.

This work could be read as nostalgic: a theme park, a wooden roller-
coaster, a young child who stares forward with the motion and an adult
who looks back and smiles at the camera: the halcyon days of innocent
weekends having fun at the theme park. However this sepia nostalgia is
referenced and then denied through the loop. Form and content are utterly
indivisible here. Ride is motion montage - a series of loops about loops
and a series of shots about the limited vocabulary of cinematic-motion
shots that cleverly jump the tracks of captured-motion while staying firmly
within the ride.

The past and the future converge in these loops. In the formal sense of
time and space, this ride is going nowhere. For if there is any sense of lin-
earity - a sense of getting ‘somewhere’ (and also of losing something) with
movement technologies - it is shattered by the loop. The loop simultane-
ously suggests two seemingly contradictory trajectories: “the loop comes
out from the actual (as past) and into the actual (as future)”.2 So the loop is
not linear, nor is it closed or merely circular. The loop of the rollercoaster is
a repetition that amplifies the charge of the movement experience. And in
so doing it produces a difference - a movement that goes nowhere, while
folding back on itself.

On the rollercoaster we ride. We experience a relationship between body,
perception and motion in a way that is quite familiar now, but to the first
passengers it would have been a revelation. The carriage swoops, turns
corners and drops down slopes. The body becomes as inert as a crash-test
dummy and glimpses of familiar landmarks emerge from the rushing land-
scape, only to recede back into the blur until the next loop. For the three
minutes on the rollercoaster, the world seems strangely distorted. Like Dr
Jekyll mutating into Mr Hyde, the familiar city twists and blurs. New angles
and new velocities bring another city to light - a city of constant mutation.
As Felix Guattari notes, not all mutations are catastrophic, but any transfor-
mation necessarily entails a political dimension. The blending of vision-
machine and motion-machine shatters any belief in the constancy of the
world. Loops can and do jump the tracks, so to speak, from rollercoasters,
trains, cars, movies, videos and back again. The loop is the best kind of
paradox - beside, beyond and past any kind of theological sense. Locked
to the rails, bound by highways or tied to cinematic technique and conven-
tion - these motion machines produce motion via modes of capture that
nevertheless manage to intersect and mutate anew.

There is a strange inertness and monotony produced by mechanical mo-
tion, a time-space recalibration that is on one level totalising (i.e. producing
standardised networks of material and information highways, generic
travel experiences and ‘by the numbers’ cinematic narratives), but which
on another level is deeply personal: the discontinuities of mass-migration,
mass-transit and mass-media produce actual lives and experiences.
In one of Harley’s earliest works, Dead-End (1988), recut audio from the
samurai film Lone Wolf and Cub is laid over sampled footage from a series
of US action thrillers from the eighties. The recut is a catalogue of shots
from the films of William Friedkin, Larry Cohen, John Cassavetes and Peter
Weir that recasts the narrative language of cinema into a moving and ana-
lytical form of motion-writing in which the generic conventions of cinema
are lovingly dismantled. As Gena Rowlands is transformed into a shogun
decapitator, and samurais stalk the train stations of Philadelphia, I feel
genuine emotion. Memory dances a little loop at this moment. The original
Gena Rowlands footage was crafted by an auteur director renowned for
working beside and beyond Hollywood generic conventions, and yet Gloria
is, to my mind, one of the best action thrillers I have ever seen.

“It’s a helluva world we live in” (Futuropolis Now, 1990)

All these loops may seem like contradictions, but that’s just the world
we live in. Thinking through movement calls all categories into question.
Things collapse and converge. In Ross Rudesch Harley’s topology, gardens
are digital, landscape is kinetic, static houses hum aesthetics of movement
and you can travel the world and never leave home. In this world, Sydney
can be New York, Mickey Mouse can peer over your shoulder at a temple in
India, and Los Angeles is everywhere.

1. Ross Harley, ‘Learning to Drive’ Cantrills Filmnotes, no.75/76, Nov. 1994
2. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, Duke Uni Press:Durham p58, 2002

Junkshop Ghosts

text by Lisa Bode

Junkshop Ghosts

In his insightful book The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (John
Hopkins University Press, 1998), critic and theorist Gilberto Perez refers to
film as a material substance that grasps the insubstantial and ungraspable
light and shadow of things once present before the camera lens. This idea
of the camera’s potential to evoke memento mori (especially the work of
Siegfried Kracauer, Roland Barthes and Andre Bazin), has tended to rest
heavily on the fleeting life of the human figure: the passing into ashes of a
grandma, a mother, or Greta Garbo.

Upon seeing a star of yesteryear or those gilded ‘Golden Years of Hol-
lywood’ actors onscreen, we often ask “where are they now?” Are they
dead, alive, retired and playing golf in Beverly Hills, plastinated beyond
recognition? What was their fate? This is the melancholic question, which,
to those of a morbid disposition, film never fails to elicit.

But what of the mortality of inanimate
objects?

Is there no other future than demolition, the junkyard, or (if they’re ‘lucky’)
the purgatory of the museum exhibition?

Watching Ross Rudesch Harley’s videoworks of the late 1980s and early
1990s, we might equally find oursleves asking “where are they now?”
of a succession of now outdated consumer products. What happened to
these once brand new, proud, and coveted furnishings, gizmos and sleek
machines of futures past?

Moving through sequences of mid-century cinematic interiors, elevators,
the curves of stairways to a curiosity with the furniture silently inhabit-
ing them, we find a monochromatic world on the cusp of the space-age,
spliced together to make new endless interior geographies in a video-edit-
ing suite at a time when all those comic-inspired sci-fi hopes of off-world
colonies had turned to dust. If all these ghostly stairways and lifts were laid
end-to-end, might they reach the stars after all?

In these interiors of the postwar period, the last vestiges of the nineteenth
century were cleared to make way for the new refrigerators, cook-tops,
televisions, furnishings and utensils moulded in the new synthetics rolling
off the production lines. Open light-filled spaces were gradually populated
with shiny kidney-shaped tables and vinyl cushions. Rudesch Harley’s vid-
eos seductively spin and caress the simple lines of chairs, cars and other
such objects from a time when the principles and aesthetics of modern
design were becoming democratised - and finally filtered their way into
the suburban home.

Similarly, the geometric and endearingly blocky title sequences and
indexes of this DVD collection evoke the aesthetics of the Commodore 64
and Amiga 500, the first personal computers to infiltrate the suburban
home in the now dimly receding 1980s.

The late 1980s soundtracks of R&B house rhythms sit uneasily with these
images, reminding us of the invisible hand in the video editing-suite seem-
ingly attempting to breathe a contemporaneity of sorts into these objects
- like botox smoothing over the forehead of the ghost of Joan Crawford.
But with each second that passes the music itself (the aural equivalent of
black lycra shorts and a baseball cap) slides further from the warm artificial
glow of nowness, like a discarded CD joining the 1950s chairs in the dusty
shadows of the junkshop.

Such objects in junkshops can be picked up, resold, rehoused and loved
again. The ghostly objects and interiors here in these videos fascinated
enough to have been salvaged and ‘rehoused’ from film to video, and now
again to DVD. Evidence can still be seen in points of past media corrosion
- the bleeding of light and interference. A process of fading, for this mo-
ment in time, arrested. Perhaps in some future time when DVDs and their
players are quaint technological curiosities, these junkshop ghosts will be
resalvaged and rehoused yet again.

Cars, lamps, buildings, tables, hats, bric-a-brac: are they all des-
tined for an ending of the same kind?