Film marks the significant interruption in time of the distribution of Punishment Park (now widely available) and the suspension of media history. But it also challenges the notion of cinematic space, of the copresence of projector and screen or other surface through the invisibility of the displaced projection. The film is reduced to the form of the projector.
At the same time, the idea of an invisible film is a very useful metaphor for reflection on the suppression of antiwar discourses and a kind of underground countermemory which, despite its repression, has a certain residual presence that is always with us. As with the ICA’s Memorial to the Iraq War exhibition, Ohanian’s work can be seen as antithetical to the overexposure associated with the televisual excess of the coverage of warfare, especially since the 1991 Gulf War. Indeed, it is precisely the stream of images of conflict and warfare that is said to have driven what many see as today’s memory boom. Ohanian’s Invisible Film offers us countermodalities of memory – in terms both of the closure of the visual mode of engagement and of the absence over time that this represents (see McLuhan 1964).
FIGURE 2.3 Julien Maire, Exploding Camera, 2007, exhibited in the Persistence of Vision exhibition, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), Liverpool.
Photo: Brian Slater.
The medium is privileged over content in another striking piece from the same exhibition in Julien Maire’s Exploding Camera (2007) (Figure 2.3). Two days before September 11, 2001, an exploding camera killed the most senior anti-Taliban Afghan war commander Massoud in his camp in Afghanistan. The use of a camera by terrorists inspired this exhibit – for Maire, it is as though the camera has continued to work to film a war film ever since. So, according to Maire, through this destroyed medium, a new live experimental historical film is rendered as a means of reinterpreting the events of the war. In this way, he implicates the camera as a new form of eyewitness both in relation to historical fact and through its process of image production.
The work consists of a still functional dissected video camera on a table which has had its lens removed. Video images are produced on a nearby monitor through direct illumination of the camera’s CCD (light sensor) through LEDs and a laser as well as external light. The images are sourced from photographic positives on a transparent disk placed between the lights and the CCD. Explosion sound effects are triggered by lights and the laser (Maire 2007).
Through constructing the camera as weapon, Maire also highlights the media as an object inextricably bound up in the conflict it purports to report on. The exploding camera is thus the ultimate realization of the weaponization of the media, and offers a kind of dystopian vision of the relationship between media and warfare. The installation thus prompts us to think about this relationship at a visceral and machinic level, making the media form centrifugal both as medium and as weapon.
However, Maire’s work is not only media archaeological in teasing with form, content, and history; it is also performative: “The lights that produce the ‘explosions’ not only illuminate the frame for the video image but also the exhibition space and spectators at the same time” (Maire 2007). In this way, according to Maire, the exhibition space becomes an “experimental film studio,” invoking the battlefield as theater. The battlefield theatricality of Exploding Camera is also emphasized by the very limited light in this space, so that spectators are almost wholly reliant on the lights from the exhibit itself and they – and the exhibit – are often plunged into darkness. Furthermore, there is no easily discernible beginning or end to the performance, and there is an absence of a chronology to disturb or to miss. In this way, the exhibit is not constrained by a punctuality, which so often makes museum media awkward for visitor navigation.
Maire’s work is an instructive case of media archaeology in affording the camera a new technological beginning. He offers material emergence from a destroyed medium in that, instead of reproducing (again) the already overfamiliar and saturative images of twenty-first-century warfare, he makes them experimental – affording them new life, history, and meaning.
An unexposed film entombed within plastic and glass, the projection of an invisible projection, an undead camera: what links these works and what more might they tell us about the uses and potentials of media archaeology in the museum? Each emphasizes and fetishizes the materiality of media hardware – the plain black camera on a white pedestal, the lone projector against a desert landscape, the deconstructed video camera, illuminated by its own explosions. The sculptural qualities of each technology is insisted on. But so is the potentiality of the image. Our expectations of media processes – production, exhibition, distribution – are frozen, denied, or disrupted. What remains are spaces of anticipation, where the spark of contingency keeps firing but never catches light. They challenge the immediacy of post-scarcity culture and the digital archival myth of total access and accumulation. While constructing alternative or hypothetical media histories, they should also be seen as part of a new set of opportunities and challenges that open up the time, space, and memory of the museum.
The “Big Picture Show,” Imperial War Museum North
In the main exhibition hall of the Imperial War Museum North (IWM North), in Manchester, UK, visitors are immersed every hour in the images and sounds of the “Big Picture Show” (see Figure 2.4). Designed as a showcase for the museum’s audiovisual collections of photography, art, archival footage, oral history, and testimony, the “Big Picture Show” consists of eight distinctive shows that focus predominantly on conflicts from World War I until the present day. The original three are themed around weaponry, the home front, and children’s experiences of war (Weapons of War, Children and War, and the War at Home, respectively). More recent commissions offer a focus on the memorialization of war (Remembrance), conflict resolution (Build the Truce), the experiences of a nurse in Afghanistan (Service and Separation), a creative response to a street bombing in Baghdad in 2007 (Al-Mutanabbi Street: A Reaction), and a Horrible Histories take on rationing during World War II (Rotten Rationing). Each foregrounds specific curatorial themes and emphasizes the museum’s remit as a war museum rather than as a military museum.2 This distinction highlights the museum’s specific focus on people’s experience of war, for example, as the male British voice that speaks out of the darkness at the beginning of Al-Mutanabbi Street: A Reaction, makes evident: “Every image, every document, every voice is part of someone’s story.” The museum website describes the “Big Picture Show” as
FIGURE 2.4 A precursor to the “Big Picture Show,” main exhibition hall, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, UK.
Photo: Andrew Hoskins, December 22, 2011.
an award-winning 360-degree experience unique to IWM North. Using surround sound, projected digital moving images and photographs, the show brings to life people’s experiences of war. It immerses you in the heart of the action, creating a complete sensory experience which is totally involving, and often very moving.3
Enabled by developments in digital sound and image projection, and certainly a distinctive exhibition strategy, the “Big Picture Show” must also be placed within a longer history of the relationship between the museum artifact and the moving image. The use of screen media in museum exhibitions is commonplace. Often acting as a supplement to object displays – documentary footage, archive film, or television operates as an additional layer of contextualization and narrativization, animating and bearing witness to the images, objects, and stories recounted. The work of Alison Griffiths (2002), Haidee Wasson (2005), and Michelle Henning (2006) reminds us that this use of moving images to supplement artifact-based exhibits
