Using a variety of screens, speakers, and moving/static objects, the Manchu Edison Film Corporation presents a form of the Telepathic Cinema, as a telepathic film which includes a history of its own invention. This will include the strangely multinational Phenakistoscope of 1832 [literal translation, “deceitful wheel”], and other geometric animation machines designed by the blind color theorist Joseph Plateau.
[Jun 20-22 2014] David Blair: The Telepathic Place -The Telepathic Machine
David Blair
Reception: Fri, Jun 20 2014, 7pm
Installation: Sat/Sun, Jun 21/22 2014, 3-7pm
Admission: FREE
Location: Harvestworks 596 Broadway, #602 | New York, NY 10012 | Phone: 212-431-1130
Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R Prince, 6 Bleecker
Using a variety of screens, speakers, and moving/static objects, the Manchu Edison Film Corporation presents a form of the Telepathic Cinema, as a telepathic film which includes a history of its own invention. This will include the strangely multinational Phenakistoscope of 1832 [literal translation, “deceitful wheel”], and other geometric animation machines designed by the blind color theorist Joseph Plateau. But that is only a beginning, and we will not forget, in the best way possible, the contributions of the colonial Manchurian cinema to these advancements. Ethical stories included.
For many years I have been at work on an alternate history of the global movie industry, based on the projects of an imaginary film company. Over these years, I’ve accumulated a large archive, or in transmedia terms, a “storyworld”, of images, real/digital objects, and narrative, which I use to create fictions, in mixed media, around this alternate history. The stories arrive from an imaginary form of “telepathic cinema” invented by the company, known as “silent sound film”, where telepathic “movietalkers” project thoughts during a film, creating a movie both interior and exterior.
This project at Harvestworks follows the logic of a 5 room “Telepathic Place” installation created last year for MuHKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. In the Project Room, I, and the Manchu Edison Film Corporation, will present a installation which evokes elements of the alternate history. This happens by a first person “movietalker” presentation, which is both a film, and evocation of the more general mechanisms of this imaginary telepathy, in a place where things are ideas, are spoken, and coincidence appears.
This presentation is in preparation for a larger production planned for the 2015 New York Electronic Arts Festival, which will represent the history of the Telepathic Cinema in the New York region, as a mental miniature of the world.
This project is made possible in part with public funds from NYSCA’s’ Electronic Media and Film Presentation Funds grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes (www.NYSCA.org www.eARTS.org).
