Movie-Movie was an expanded cinema performance that was specially created for the 4th Experimental Film Festival in Belgium. Film, slides and liquid-light show effects were projected on and through a thirty foot inflatable plastic dome and the people interacting in and around it. Expanded cinema, as theorized by Gene Youngblood, sought to extend the range of possibility of film by incorporating unconventional media, performance, and contexts (AEM, p. 218-19). MovieMovie anticipates subsequent artworks by Shaw incorporating virtual reality and other technological media.

“Three performers – Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuyver, and Sean Wellesley-Miller – dressed in white overalls, first carried in the inflatable structure and unrolled it on the floor. While it was being gradually inflated, film, slides and liquid-light show effects were projected onto its surface. Its fully inflated shape was a 7m diameter and 10m high cone with an outer transparent membrane and an inner white surface. The projected imagery first impinged lightly on the outer envelope and then appeared on the semi-inflated inner surface; in the intermediate space various material actions were performed.” [1]

The intention of this work was to transmute the conventional flat cinema projection screen into a three dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of visualization. The multiple projection surfaces allowed the images to materialize in many layers, and the physical bodies of the performers and then of the audience became part of the cinematic spectacle. In this way the immersive space of cinematic fiction included the literal and interactive immersion of the viewers who modulating the changing shapes of the pneumatic architecture which in turn modulated the shifting deformations of the projected imagery. With speakers placed both outside and inside the structure, its acoustic environment was also modulated in this way.

Video documentation of the work on Vimeo.

Relations to other artworks

Since the late 60’s Jeffrey Shaw has pioneered the use of interactivity and virtuality in his many art installations. His works have been exhibited worldwide at major museums and festivals. [2] Jeffrey Shaw’s early works where often various forms of expanded cinema performances. Other Air structure/mixed-media events by Jeffrey Shaw are Disillusion of a Fish Pond (1967) and Corpocinema (1967).

MovieMovie can also be seen as a predecessor of virtual spaces. Shaw described it as, “A sensual conjunction of actuality and fiction was achieved through a mediated dematerialisation of their respective boundaries. Such a convergence of architectonic and cinematic space clearly prefigures the modalities of mediated architecture that today are being built in cyberspace.” [3]  In 2001, the artist realised this vision with his work conFIGURING the CAVE (2001). See AEM, p 177.

Jeffrey Shaw’s website <http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net.>

References

[1] Official Jeffrey Shaw Website, MovieMovie, <http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/html_main/show_work.php3?record_id=11>

[2] Jeffrey Shaw’s Biography <http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/html_titles/titles_biography.php3>

[3] Jeffrey Shaw, “Movies After Film – The Digitally Expanded Cinema” (2002), in Edward Shanken, ed. Art and Electronic Media. London: Phaidon, 2009: p. 264.