So as you notices from that and this is very interesting article for me, because of course he tried to
induce this idea what was at that time essence of ideological aesthetic investigation about the
semiology. But the semiology of film as I was understanding it, because I understood semiotics from
Czech semiological school of the 20s and 30s but that's just total derivation, because film at that time
when I was working in video it was in different questions, it still had the questions about the structure
and science and myth, but all for me was semiology was going into the archetypes and the most banal
subjects. They were seriously discussing the King Kong because it's the movie and you know all these
modality of the traditional success of film didn't interest me because I found it completely irrelevant.
Even in a way of an intellectual examination of within experimental film they totally failed, there were
very few people that even from the official semiological investigative that had some substance like the
philosophers of the French or whatever, they were kind of looking into popular culture, they were not
really interested in experiment, and they couldn't because remember, this is experimentation in film at
that time was continuous motion, it was in movement, it developed day by day almost in a short period
and what semiology needs is to freeze it, they need some translation, and we had this discussion with
Gene as I now remember was a complete in a way misunderstanding and it was in a way.
I was trying to explain to Gene that it may sound too mechanistic to his intellectual interest but we are
not there in description of code system or coding arrangements or coding composition or coding this
new code any other exploitation just by the struggle with time, these are all the old time machines and
then you see what captivated me from the beginning since we are functioning of clock, each of these
machines called computers are based on the clock division of time. And between these two functions,
one is addressing, one thick, which is followed by accessing the data, this all addressing and then the
performance of the data. In accessing one thick, you have to get new data in or you have to develop
data in and in second thick you have to process them and put them into a storage or somewhere. The
timing between these things are crucial if you have a long time within this two in a modern system, you
waste time, suddenly the time acquires the bulb, that's why the struggle is to make it faster and faster
but between these two functions of acquisition, processing and storage you have to squeeze in so many
aspects of information about the next frame.
So it goes all about this idea of struggling with time and finding time for more functions in a smaller
and smaller time division. So this idea of how you gain space in a machine, in order to serve our
cognitive process of vision, this territory was the most interesting for me. But it's an esoteric thing. But
it now plays major role in real time machinery, what can you do in so called real time. In those years
there was virtually no real time. It was just animation, it was dominant. So I was trying to avoid the
issue but I know I had to answer something but I was trying to squeeze his kind of interrogation away
from these archetypal subjects of semiology of time. And especially the French school I had total
disrespect for because they would use publications like Time magazine and data from Heresay because
they were into a different representation, of the social consciousness, so it never ran with me well and I
find this in film possible, because there was no struggle about frame by frame, they were not concerned
with time between two frames because there was a mechanical thing, you had a piece of machinery that
represented new frame which was there already before. So these two time machines which I later
described in that revised new article were early interest of mine. I should have continued but I didn't I
went into whole different, because there was no audience for it anyway, but I should not have been
dependent on the audience.
Did someone develop these ideas?
There was just one man I could speak about with and it was Werner Nekes...he was very interested in
this also, but for film it's a terminal question because what can you discuss between preceding,
suceeding except the mind and nobody from film could enter the mind because it's purely
psychological, at that time it wasn't clear how actually the brain receives, if it actually prints the frame,
it's still not clear, it's called the cognition of moving images and if you type it on the computer you just
see first of all it's expensive because they charge you 25 dollars for reading it but that's not what I am
interested in, it's not to analyze existing media but to challenge it into completely futuristic rate of
representation of images and see what brain says to that.
See, brain is the territory of investigation that I have no tools, I could had have tools but I missed that
completely. Because I went into this robotic, or media constructions, just to keep my too feet in art
content, if I would be let's say professor, I never wanted to be, I would probably establish some
machinery that would examine what happens between very fast frames, that would interest me. But not
what happens to the frame, we know that mind accepted film so willingly that's stunning, it's almost
obscene...it's like it was waiting for it. Of course there was some proto-cinema which was absolutely
clear gateway to this future cinema, but there's the way how society and industry of image making have
ladged on it and how it exploited every aspect of it and established immediately after two decades there
was intelligent constructive system of syntaxing, editing the material and it brought it very rapidly into
intellectual mainstream. It could compete with anything, like music of very established artist in history
and literature, it coopted literature and so forth. It got all kinds of scholarship instantly and get
intelligencia being interested. It was just success, and after this purely new avang-garde, like in film
also in Europe had to deal with questioning these other aspects, not those that are semiologically
containable and scholarship and professorship could be built on, this was unknown, only few people
could jump into this and try to swim but they probably regretted it, so that's kind of a strange end of it.
