The Moving Image Project
2014 | International | Curator
A travelling exhibition of short moving-image works, presented wherever a screen or surface could be found.
A Portable Exhibition
The Moving Image Project began with a simple idea: to make an exhibition that could travel.
In 2014, Levine travelled internationally, visiting friends and artists in Japan, India and New Zealand. Rather than treating the journey as separate from her curatorial practice, she decided to take an exhibition with her.
She had recently bought a small pico projector that connected to her phone. The possibilities were immediate. Artists were invited to contribute short moving-image works that did not rely on sound, allowing the films to be projected wherever a suitable surface could be found.
The project began with a small collection of works and a projector in a bag. It grew through encounters, travel and invitation.
In 2014, Levine travelled internationally, visiting friends and artists in Japan, India and New Zealand. Rather than treating the journey as separate from her curatorial practice, she decided to take an exhibition with her.
She had recently bought a small pico projector that connected to her phone. The possibilities were immediate. Artists were invited to contribute short moving-image works that did not rely on sound, allowing the films to be projected wherever a suitable surface could be found.
The project began with a small collection of works and a projector in a bag. It grew through encounters, travel and invitation.
The Screen Anywhere
Without a gallery, the project made a screen wherever it went. Films were projected onto the ceiling of a plane, onto walls in cafés while Levine stopped for tea, inside an artist residency in Tokyo, and onto the palms of people's hands.
In Baroda, India, the project expanded into a larger public presentation organised with artist Vishwa Shroff, with the films projected at scale as part of a dedicated event.
The absence of sound was important. It allowed the project to move between environments without requiring control over the surrounding space, and meant that a film could be encountered casually, unexpectedly and sometimes only briefly. The project treated projection as an opportunity rather than a requirement for a particular kind of space.
In Baroda, India, the project expanded into a larger public presentation organised with artist Vishwa Shroff, with the films projected at scale as part of a dedicated event.
The absence of sound was important. It allowed the project to move between environments without requiring control over the surrounding space, and meant that a film could be encountered casually, unexpectedly and sometimes only briefly. The project treated projection as an opportunity rather than a requirement for a particular kind of space.
An Expanding Network
The initial group of artists was drawn from Levine's existing networks, artists she admired and people she wanted to work with. Some invitations grew from professional encounters. Wood & Harrison, for example, were approached after Levine had sat on a panel with one of the artists, who then generously contributed films to the project.
As Levine travelled, the network expanded through new encounters. Artists including Yu Araki in Japan and Miranda Parkes in New Zealand became part of the growing collection.
The project therefore developed through the same informal networks that shaped much of Levine's early independent curatorial practice: conversations, recommendations, chance meetings and the willingness to ask.
As Levine travelled, the network expanded through new encounters. Artists including Yu Araki in Japan and Miranda Parkes in New Zealand became part of the growing collection.
The project therefore developed through the same informal networks that shaped much of Levine's early independent curatorial practice: conversations, recommendations, chance meetings and the willingness to ask.
From Portable Project to Exhibition
What began as a personal experiment quickly developed into a series of formal exhibition opportunities.
In Baroda, the films were presented as a larger-scale public projection event. At The Hospital Club in London, the project was presented both in the cinema and on a monitor in the venue's window, where the films reached an accidental audience beyond those who had come specifically to see the exhibition.
The project later expanded again through Sluice__Expo in Brooklyn, where the growing collection of films was presented at Brooklyn Fireproof.
Each presentation retained the original premise: moving image did not require a conventional gallery in order to be encountered.
In Baroda, the films were presented as a larger-scale public projection event. At The Hospital Club in London, the project was presented both in the cinema and on a monitor in the venue's window, where the films reached an accidental audience beyond those who had come specifically to see the exhibition.
The project later expanded again through Sluice__Expo in Brooklyn, where the growing collection of films was presented at Brooklyn Fireproof.
Each presentation retained the original premise: moving image did not require a conventional gallery in order to be encountered.
A Curatorial Method
The Moving Image Project developed from a simple premise, that a gallery is not a prerequisite for curating. A curator can create a context for encountering work using whatever is available: a wall, a window, a ceiling, a café, a cinema or even the palm of a hand.
The project extended Levine's interest in the frame beyond the gallery and into temporary, mobile and everyday spaces. The films themselves did not necessarily change from one location to another, but the conditions in which they were encountered did.
The project became an early expression of what Levine now describes as expanded curating, where her practice responds to and creates sites for art beyond conventional exhibition spaces, using the possibilities of the frame, the network and the encounter to make new contexts for looking. When there is no space for an exhibition, Levine's answer remains simple: Make one
The project extended Levine's interest in the frame beyond the gallery and into temporary, mobile and everyday spaces. The films themselves did not necessarily change from one location to another, but the conditions in which they were encountered did.
The project became an early expression of what Levine now describes as expanded curating, where her practice responds to and creates sites for art beyond conventional exhibition spaces, using the possibilities of the frame, the network and the encounter to make new contexts for looking. When there is no space for an exhibition, Levine's answer remains simple: Make one
Archive
Artists: Yu Araki, Jaime Castro, Elly Clarke, Eleanor Cunningham, Camille de Saint-Jean, Karl England, Nicolas Feldmeyer, Craig Green, Jaime Humphreys, Hui-Hsuan Hsu, Will Kendrick, Laura Leahy, Joe Newlin, Miranda Parkes, Chinmoyi Patel, Nathan Pohio, Frazer Price, James Quin, Antonio Roberts, Daniel Salisbury, Patrick Segura, Vishwa Shroff, John Stewardson, Wood and Harrison
Tokyo, JPN, Baroda, IN, Christchurch, NZ, Bushwick, NY, London, UK
"In the vein of a travelling circus, The Moving Image Project is made up of a curious mix of images and films that are going on a journey. UK curator Charlie Levine has invited various artists from around the world to submit short silent films or still images that she will show via her mobile phone and pico projector wherever she goes. As ringmaster she will pick and chose location and artwork along the way, as well as pick up new participating artists, advertising its presence via an online notice board. The Moving Image Project is about encounter, transience, travel and catching a glimpse. It encourages conversation, interaction and mimics Duchamp’s Museum in Suitcase, the idea that you can travel the world with an exhibition, in this case, in the palm of your hand."
Essay
The Moving Image Project text by James Quin, Sept 2014
Charlie Levine’s The Moving Image Project brings together a collection of artists short films, each with duration no longer than eight minutes with some films so short that they barely register as anything more than a split second caught in the corner of the eye whilst travelling on a high speed train. Levine’s platform of choice is a mobile phone connected to a pico projector, a choice of technology that has allowed her to show the corpus of work in galleries, coffee shops, airplanes and even on that most intimate of ‘screens’ – the body - in this case, palms of the hand. The project to date has been seen in London, Tokyo, New York and points in-between.
Anyone familiar with long distance air travel experiences an expansion and contraction of time combined with spatial indeterminacy, a liminal world of ‘in-between-ness’, neither here nor there, past or future, an extended present-ness that encapsulates the boredom of the long haul flight and accompanying succession of transitory worlds apprehended at a glimpse. Levine is a curator ‘on the move’, and it is this crossing of geographical boundaries and more importantly the deterritorialisation of time-zones that seems to have been the impetus for The Moving Image Project. Levine’s The Moving Image Project literally becomes one of ‘images on the move’.
The emergence of technologies such as the railway and the telegraph in the 1870’s formed the world in which we now live, specifically the way in which we, as temporal beings ‘think’ time. Rebecca Solnit in her excellent book Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge makes the case that the ‘annihilation of time and space’ through such technologies was inseparable from the development of the ‘moving picture’. What agency might the mobile phone possess in reconfiguring our relation to time in the present? Hungarian philosopher Kristóf Nyíri in Time and the Mobile Order argues that “[t]he mobile phone, rather than breaking up time, gives rise to a new synthesis of mechanical time and organic time”.
Levine’s project may shed light on this synthesis of mechanical and organic time in the mobile phone’s enabling of “recurrent programme reshuffling - communication that coordinates movement in space and time while” ‘on the move’, let alone its ancillary, though handy ability to store and project images.
Film and photography has an especially privileged relation to time, continuing to fascinate the temporal (human) being in its ability to reanimate the inanimate and its concomitant capacity to conflate temporal registers – the then, next, after, past, present and future that are inextricably bound to the medium. In Levine’s The Moving Image Project these registers are further complicated by her decision to edit together disparate short films in a time line and loop them for the duration of their showing.
It is this process of looping, return and therefore a deferred closure that uncovers films ability to unravel the linear time-line and ultimately challenge conventional narrative in film as thematised in Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Movement-Image’ in contradistinction to what he described as the ‘Time-Image’. In Levine’s The Moving Image Project what we essentially encounter is a Deleuzian ‘Time-Image’ or ‘Crystal Image of Time’, where the montaged short films function as a hall of mirrors, infused with past, present and future. The reshuffling of sequence or a re-ordering of the films time-line allows another facet of the ‘Crystal-Image of Time’ to become apparent - through ‘difference’.
There is another layer to Levine’s project that is worth noting here, and it is a layer in absentia – one of sound. Due to necessity, the films are shown without accompanying soundtrack or dialogue; they are resolutely silent, rendering them a dream-like quality. It is this silence that inadvertently connects Levine’s project to an earlier ‘silent’ incarnation of cinema - the cinema of Dziga Vertov. Some of the short film pieces chosen by Levine interrogate relations between the still and moving image within film, and, perhaps the most powerful and insightful example of this relation can be found in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), where the moving image of a white horse at full trot is cut to a still image of the horse. The affect is breathtaking, a stillness that seems to expose, according to numerous film theorists, ‘cinemas secret subject’, that of stillness.
In conversation with Levine I was interested to hear The Moving Image Project, described as a “show reel”. Again, this seems to expose anachronistic (in this sense –‘up against time’- rather than the pejorative ‘out of fashion’) comparisons with emergent 19th century cinematic technologies and the forums for their dissemination. “Show reel”, puts us in mind of earlier manifestations of the moving image, the zoetrope, Praxinoscope, Cinématographe and the Magic Lantern where the operative word would be “show” and, the not yet realised ‘reel’, and more importantly, in the context of Levine’s project, the venues in which such proto-cinematic technologies were to be encountered,
Levine’s projections of The Moving Image Project into coffee shops, galleries, the interiors of aircraft fuselages and the extremities of the human body, are part of a long tradition of ‘the spectacle and spectacular’, the shared encounter of the strange and the uncanny, the tented travelling circus of curiosities and world fairs. And yet an equally prevalent 19th century preoccupation was in communication with an altogether different world - the world of séance and spirit, the attempt to reanimate the inanimate. What, if nothing else is film and photography, if it is not a form of haunting, and, are we not engaged as both spectators and creators of images in a perpetual conversation with the dead?
It would be worthwhile to conclude my own thoughts on Levine’s fascinating The Moving Image Project by placing it alongside, ‘Duchamp’s Box in a Suitcase’ and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, as examples of proto-sampling. What might they have in common? The answer is very much. At the risk of oversimplification, all three projects, rooted, as they are in their respective ‘present and pasts’, have an ‘eye on the future’ and I wait with interest to see how this project develops as Levine continues her The Moving Image Project, on the move.
Anyone familiar with long distance air travel experiences an expansion and contraction of time combined with spatial indeterminacy, a liminal world of ‘in-between-ness’, neither here nor there, past or future, an extended present-ness that encapsulates the boredom of the long haul flight and accompanying succession of transitory worlds apprehended at a glimpse. Levine is a curator ‘on the move’, and it is this crossing of geographical boundaries and more importantly the deterritorialisation of time-zones that seems to have been the impetus for The Moving Image Project. Levine’s The Moving Image Project literally becomes one of ‘images on the move’.
The emergence of technologies such as the railway and the telegraph in the 1870’s formed the world in which we now live, specifically the way in which we, as temporal beings ‘think’ time. Rebecca Solnit in her excellent book Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge makes the case that the ‘annihilation of time and space’ through such technologies was inseparable from the development of the ‘moving picture’. What agency might the mobile phone possess in reconfiguring our relation to time in the present? Hungarian philosopher Kristóf Nyíri in Time and the Mobile Order argues that “[t]he mobile phone, rather than breaking up time, gives rise to a new synthesis of mechanical time and organic time”.
Levine’s project may shed light on this synthesis of mechanical and organic time in the mobile phone’s enabling of “recurrent programme reshuffling - communication that coordinates movement in space and time while” ‘on the move’, let alone its ancillary, though handy ability to store and project images.
Film and photography has an especially privileged relation to time, continuing to fascinate the temporal (human) being in its ability to reanimate the inanimate and its concomitant capacity to conflate temporal registers – the then, next, after, past, present and future that are inextricably bound to the medium. In Levine’s The Moving Image Project these registers are further complicated by her decision to edit together disparate short films in a time line and loop them for the duration of their showing.
It is this process of looping, return and therefore a deferred closure that uncovers films ability to unravel the linear time-line and ultimately challenge conventional narrative in film as thematised in Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Movement-Image’ in contradistinction to what he described as the ‘Time-Image’. In Levine’s The Moving Image Project what we essentially encounter is a Deleuzian ‘Time-Image’ or ‘Crystal Image of Time’, where the montaged short films function as a hall of mirrors, infused with past, present and future. The reshuffling of sequence or a re-ordering of the films time-line allows another facet of the ‘Crystal-Image of Time’ to become apparent - through ‘difference’.
There is another layer to Levine’s project that is worth noting here, and it is a layer in absentia – one of sound. Due to necessity, the films are shown without accompanying soundtrack or dialogue; they are resolutely silent, rendering them a dream-like quality. It is this silence that inadvertently connects Levine’s project to an earlier ‘silent’ incarnation of cinema - the cinema of Dziga Vertov. Some of the short film pieces chosen by Levine interrogate relations between the still and moving image within film, and, perhaps the most powerful and insightful example of this relation can be found in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), where the moving image of a white horse at full trot is cut to a still image of the horse. The affect is breathtaking, a stillness that seems to expose, according to numerous film theorists, ‘cinemas secret subject’, that of stillness.
In conversation with Levine I was interested to hear The Moving Image Project, described as a “show reel”. Again, this seems to expose anachronistic (in this sense –‘up against time’- rather than the pejorative ‘out of fashion’) comparisons with emergent 19th century cinematic technologies and the forums for their dissemination. “Show reel”, puts us in mind of earlier manifestations of the moving image, the zoetrope, Praxinoscope, Cinématographe and the Magic Lantern where the operative word would be “show” and, the not yet realised ‘reel’, and more importantly, in the context of Levine’s project, the venues in which such proto-cinematic technologies were to be encountered,
Levine’s projections of The Moving Image Project into coffee shops, galleries, the interiors of aircraft fuselages and the extremities of the human body, are part of a long tradition of ‘the spectacle and spectacular’, the shared encounter of the strange and the uncanny, the tented travelling circus of curiosities and world fairs. And yet an equally prevalent 19th century preoccupation was in communication with an altogether different world - the world of séance and spirit, the attempt to reanimate the inanimate. What, if nothing else is film and photography, if it is not a form of haunting, and, are we not engaged as both spectators and creators of images in a perpetual conversation with the dead?
It would be worthwhile to conclude my own thoughts on Levine’s fascinating The Moving Image Project by placing it alongside, ‘Duchamp’s Box in a Suitcase’ and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, as examples of proto-sampling. What might they have in common? The answer is very much. At the risk of oversimplification, all three projects, rooted, as they are in their respective ‘present and pasts’, have an ‘eye on the future’ and I wait with interest to see how this project develops as Levine continues her The Moving Image Project, on the move.
