Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Perhaps the Medium-Specificity of the Contemporary Performing Arts is Mutation?
- Theatre Between Performance and Installation: Three Contemporary Belgian Examples
- The Fourth Wall, or the Rift Between Citizen and Government: Another Attempt at a Conceptual Synthesis of Theatre and Politics
- Using Recorded Images for Political Purposes
- A Campsite for the Avant-Garde and a Church in Cyberspace: Christoph Schlingensief ’s Dialogue with Avant-Gardism
- Echoes from the Animist Past: Abattoir Fermé’s Dark Backward and Abysm of Time
- Folding Mutants or Crumbling Hybrids?: Of Looking Baroque in Contemporary Theatre and Performance
- Making UNMAKEABLELOVE: The Relocation of Theatre
- Witness Protection?: Surveillance Technologies in Theatrical Performance
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Intermedial Reproduction: Rimini Protokoll’s Mnemopark
- Rimini Protokoll’s Theatricalization of Reality
- Digital Landscapes: The Meta-Picturesque Qualities of Kurt d’Haeseleer’s Audiovisual Sceneries
- The Productivity of the Prototype: On Julien Maire’s ‘Cinema of Contraptions’
- The Theatre of Recorded Sound and Film: Vacating Performance in Michael Curran’s Look What They Done To My Song
- Doubled Bodies and Live Loops: On Ragnar Kjartansson’s Mediatized Performances
- Between Solitaire and a Basketball Game: Dramaturgical Strategies in the Work of Antonia Baehr
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
The Productivity of the Prototype: On Julien Maire’s ‘Cinema of Contraptions’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Perhaps the Medium-Specificity of the Contemporary Performing Arts is Mutation?
- Theatre Between Performance and Installation: Three Contemporary Belgian Examples
- The Fourth Wall, or the Rift Between Citizen and Government: Another Attempt at a Conceptual Synthesis of Theatre and Politics
- Using Recorded Images for Political Purposes
- A Campsite for the Avant-Garde and a Church in Cyberspace: Christoph Schlingensief ’s Dialogue with Avant-Gardism
- Echoes from the Animist Past: Abattoir Fermé’s Dark Backward and Abysm of Time
- Folding Mutants or Crumbling Hybrids?: Of Looking Baroque in Contemporary Theatre and Performance
- Making UNMAKEABLELOVE: The Relocation of Theatre
- Witness Protection?: Surveillance Technologies in Theatrical Performance
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Intermedial Reproduction: Rimini Protokoll’s Mnemopark
- Rimini Protokoll’s Theatricalization of Reality
- Digital Landscapes: The Meta-Picturesque Qualities of Kurt d’Haeseleer’s Audiovisual Sceneries
- The Productivity of the Prototype: On Julien Maire’s ‘Cinema of Contraptions’
- The Theatre of Recorded Sound and Film: Vacating Performance in Michael Curran’s Look What They Done To My Song
- Doubled Bodies and Live Loops: On Ragnar Kjartansson’s Mediatized Performances
- Between Solitaire and a Basketball Game: Dramaturgical Strategies in the Work of Antonia Baehr
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
Summary
In his artworks and performances, Julien Maire (b. 1969, France) systematically re-invents the technology of visual media. His research is a manifest hybrid between mediaarchaeology and the production of new media constellations. His output consists of prototypes that perform exactly what their etymology promises (from ‘protos’, ‘first’ and ‘typos’, ‘impression’ or ‘model’): proposing unique technological configurations that produce a new, specific image quality. As industrial prototypes, these original creations – no matter how technically clever and refined – are rather useless: they are too complex, too delicate and too clunky to ever be considered for mass production. As artistic statements, the main function of these full-scale constructions is to provoke an effect of wonder, alerting the viewer to the ambivalent status of moving images produced by a machine.
In a contemporary context of mutating media, Maire's works are at once innovative and archaic, seemingly simple yet unique in their radicality, both at the conceptual and the aesthetic level. This radicality is one that incites fundamental questions about the characteristics of the image and the position of their viewer. Working on the interstices between installation, performance and media art, Maire's creations are decidedly original, as he never combines art forms merely for a provocative or innovative effect. His manipulations are always motivated by a questioning of prevailing categories and visual strategies in the digital era.
Deconstructing time-based media such as video, film, slide projections and performances, Julien Maire underlines in the first place their durational aspect, making us aware of our own experience of an image in time. His prototypical contraptions confront immobility with movement, reality with illusion, and interrogate the notion of time and memory in the moving image. With his work, Julien Maire clearly enters into dialogue with the history of media, paradoxically through the design of new technological dispositifs. Working against the rhetoric of technology as progress and promise, Maire instead recalibrates technology and its effect on mediation. He modifies obsolete cinematic techniques to develop alternative interfaces that produce moving images.
Overcoming a simplistic opposition between analogue and digital media, Maire's work readily invites both a strategic reconsideration of indexicality and of apparatus theory.
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- Information
- Bastard or Playmate?Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and Contemporary Performing Arts, pp. 178 - 195Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2012
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