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16mm möbius film
loop, blood, silicon projection screen, iron steel structure,
custom projector with variable frame rate [0.25-24fps]
7’ x 3’
x 1’
« project cut bleed flow twist fuse return eternal dying crack slide
glide loop »
Thank you Candice Tarnowski, Kara Maiko + Jane Tingley.
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Prototype
version shown in Cube on the Move, Montreal, April 8-9, 2006
From the catalogue Cube on
the Move:
« The following statement
is true. The previous statement is false.
The Möbius strip – here a degenerative 16mm film loop –
is a closed,
one-sided surface that is constructed from any rectangle (say, a
bloodied film strip) by holding one end fixed, rotating the opposite
end with a half-twist and then joining (splicing) it back to the first
end. In this sense, it has the mathematical property of being
non-orientable. It has been described as a topological representation
of the logic pertaining to self-reference – a looping back of and
on
the 'self' to describe some aspect of its own form or structure –,
putting on display the conceptual classes of an outside interior and
an inside exterior. Globally, the interior is the exterior and vice
versa, but locally, they are distinct.
Cut me out, twist me, and glue me to form a Möbius strip, please.
Charles Stankievech's möbius serum albumin can act as a
sort of
analogy for the chiasmic relation between dualities of mind and body
and art and artist, primarily through the active display of the
latter. The kinetic sculpture, formed of custom projector and the
aforementioned filmstrip covered in the artist's own blood, looped at
a variable frame rate (0.25-24fps), initially brings together artist
and artwork in self-contained manner. Furthermore, the traced outline
profile of the mechanical sculpture doubles as a crude reference to
the artist's own profile caught in an act of self-stabbing. The work
therefore outlines part of its own creation, with its own logical
organization creating the physical structure to create itself.
Machine: any object(s) put together mechanically.
Albumin is the protein responsible for maintaining the oncotic
pressure of blood, ensuring that it does not leak out into the
surrounding tissues. Here, in title and in work, it works to
symbolically be and contain its referent: the artist. However, over
the course of the exhibition, degeneration of the short film loop
caused by continuous play required Stankievech to perform multiple
emergency artistic surgeries on his strip. Interestingly then, the
artist's preliminary marks and remarks ('cut, splice, glue') become
(re)integrated into the work, forming a meta-artistic loop, despite
the Möbius resistor's claim to no residual self-inductance. Through
this degeneration, the work simultaneously revives, revises, and
arguably, refines itself. A final act of self-reference, the playing
of the bloody film loop at 8fps, pointing to neighboring artist James
F. Craig's contribution to the exhibition – oil paintings of eight
sequential frames of film from Pretty in Pink –, re-opens the work's
wounds, allowing it to leak out and form an additional outside
interior.
The following statement's true. The previous statement's false. »
. Shawn Petsche
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