Media Translations: From Analogue Film to Immersive Narratives
Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, July 2025
This workshop deals with the aesthetic and political possibilities of translating creative ideas between media materialities. We will develop a series of experiments that begin in analogue media yet mutate constantly as the analogue media is manipulated using the different image and sound technologies. In this process, we will turn to artistic research methods that can aid the design, implementation and documentation of transmedia projects. The workshop invites participants to address their own positioning in relation to the technologies they use, exploring the narrative potential of their practice.
During the workshop, we will navigate diverse media surfaces as platforms for expanding our sensemaking processes in our hypertechnified world. Through grounded experimentation, we will question the technological programs that trick us into burying supposedly obsolete technologies. Incorporating radical imagination, critical inquiry and performative activations as strategies for media design and implementation, we will reach a collective expanded cinema installation at the end of the workshop composed by fragments of the participants’ projects, using analogue projection, immersive video and other techniques that will illustrate some of the questions, provocations and ideas brought forward by the group’s sensibilities.
Daily plan
* Note: the work done during the workshop will have different tracks; first, collective exercises and discussions; second, individual production-research space on personal projects; third, one on one feedback sessions (ideally 2, 1 first week, 1 second week), where we sit and review personal projects beyond the horizon of the project. Content below.
Day 1: Introduction to the workshop, group presentations, objectives, theoretical premises, detonating ritual: sensing the place, projecting our life stories within a concrete, historical space; art as a ritual of care; install in personal studio space, manifest what you bring and what you want to achieve.
Day 2: The artist studio as a space and as a process; screening (William Kentridge); reading (William Kentridge); Collective Phytograms (A); portraits in 16mm, developing in the darkroom.
Day 3: Performing our archives: introduction to the notions of poetics of information and the archive as a critical event; projecting our archives within the common space; modeling as world building; 16mm shoots of our archives;
Day 4: The Body-Camera and the Camera-Body: choreographies for camera as an ethics of audiovisual aesthetics; shooting and weaving first 360º environment.
Day 5: Expanded montage: theories of montage; first approximations to the collective installation inside our classroom; Diagrams of collective installation;
Day 6 (optional): Second diagram of collective installation, planning for second week and open studios; editing material produced at the moment; open production space at studios.
Day 7: Forensic Imagination and Cartographic Speculation: two modalities of critical action; keep working on installation, iterations on materials produced during the first week.
Day 8: Expanded and experimental writing; working towards collective project
Day 9: Production of collective installation
Day 10: Speculative documentary practice: actualizing new worlds; Production of collective installation
Day 11: Final reflections and rituals of closure; Opening of collective installation
“That kind of splitting is something you’re aware of in the studio, but it’s not just about the studio. It’s a human phenomenon — being yourself and stepping back from yourself”.
“The studio is an impure mixture of history, ideas, and materials, deeply connected to the world around us”.
“Allowing the body rather than the head to lead you in the studio means allowing a lot of leeway to your arm, your hand”.
I take in-formation as a process, the continuous emergence of form. The Poetics Eccentric Pedagogy of Information is the art of making sense, of communicating forms in meaningful ways. It is a practice of invention, the reconfiguration of transmedia entanglements. Forms are understood here as condensations of expressions, human and more-than-human, whose duration and character depend on their organic and inorganic embodiments.
““We are not concerned with facts if facts are considered to be self-evident objects always already present in the world. Furthermore, we hold that this common-sense definition of facts, this theoretical primacy of facts, must be challenged. Facts have to be treated as processes. One of the questions we find ourselves asking is: How do we approach facts not in their crude facticity but through the complicated mediation by which facts acquire their immediacy? (…) We do not consider “The Lebanese Civil War” to be a settled chronology of events, dates, personalities, massacres, invasions, but rather we also want to consider it as an abstraction constituted by various discourses and, more importantly, by various modes of assimilating the data of the world”
The Atlas Group / Walid Raad
Archive as a critical event
Archive as event – from Badiou (the event as a site of multiplicity)
Derrida: the archive as tension between order and disorder.
Arkhé – place of beginning – normative
Triangle: archon-law-place
Witness-truth as temporal paradigm / privilege
Imprints —-documents Process of inscription / materiality and technique /
Archaeology – Foucault – historical apriori / given sentences / events and things
Systems of relationships that configure the archive, its possibilites and impossibilities
Tension between preservation and erasure
Memory between Ministry and Mistery
“(…) what’s institutionalized as the order of things is not only indignant but reversible, and its archival work is one of the keys of this reversibility. Intervention, imagination and transmission are the main practices through which researchers and artists exercise their right to (of) the archive, that is, the right to share it, to make use of it in ways that it is not taken as a deposit from the past, that stocks what has finished and what’s been done” (Azoulay, 2014: 17).
Constituent and Instituent Violence
Potential history and site of events
Missing images
Incompatibility with the past
Imagination, intervention, transmission
Archive and the horizons of the world
— our production is in itself an Archive…
Strategies for creating with the archive: reacataloguing juxtaposing documentary times repetition recapture intervention at different levels cutting / multiplication / unfolding of the document intertextuality transference between mediums
processing — analogue or digital — (speed, textures) tinting erasure modifying the conditions of the medium decomposing / alterations of medium error relocalization
Types of documents and operative dimensions:
– Documentary horizon (our own or alien) – localization – rules of access and use / possibilities of appropriation, intervention and dissemination (including rights and materialities)
– According to the medium : materialities, temporalities (technical and discoursive level)
– Conditions: material o political.
– Codes / Languages.
The Camera-body and the Body-camera as a method for filmmaking
“The ancient Greeks used the word aisthesis to describe that which pertains to the senses. Aesthetics thus concerns the experience of the world. It involves sensing – the capacity to register or to be affected, and sensemaking – the capacity for such sensing to become knowledge of some kind. The finding or invention of means to achieve such effects is to aestheticise. Defining aesthetics in this way allows us to derive two other terms: hyper-aesthetics , which we consider to be the augmentation and elaboration of such experience, and hyperaesthesia , which we consider to be the state in which experience overloads or collapses, and, as a result, sensation stops making sense. In this expanded meaning, as a way of sensing the world, aesthetics does not exclusively refer to a property or capacity of humans. It equally refers to other sensing organisms, such as animals and plants, which themselves apprehend their environment. Further, we argue that sensing is also found in material surfaces and substances, on which traces of impact or slower processes of change are registered, including in digital and computational sensors, which themselves detect, register and predict in multiple novel ways.” (p. 33).
“Sensing is thus only a part of the more complex question of sensemaking. The former is the result of the receptive action of a sensory organ, a material or a system. The latter involves experience and understanding of what is being sensed, a perception and conception, or a world view, if you like.
Making sense involves constructing means of sensing. This can take place through the design and development of technologies and techniques – literally making senses – or of reflections and enquiries into sensing, making sense as reasoning of different kinds. The sense-making aspect of material aesthetics is more complex and always involves relations between substances and organisms. We should also keep an open mind as to whether artificial forms of sense-making might arise.” (p. 34)
“Both sensing and sense-making, then, each necessarily involve a tension with the other. They may even sometimes seek to undo each other.” (p. 34)
“In the unfolding of each sensing entity and process of sensemaking, aesthetics is situated and perspectival. Each particular form of experience has inherently unique aspects that not only shape it but constitute it. This given, aesthetics can also be a collective practice which assembles the multiple varied and sometimes seemingly incompatible situated experiences – of different individuals and groups, of matter and code – into a poly-perspectival rendering of a situation, combining multiple views from within.” (p. 34)
“So aesthetics is an approach that is fundamentally about assembling, and finding the means to recognise, a multiplicity of different forms of sensation.” (p. 35)
“Aesthetics is always relational” (p. 35).
“Communication is not simply about sending signals, but it is about transformative interconnection” (p. 36)
“Evolving or designing new sensors and capacities of sensation, perhaps in such chains of technologies and organisms, implies constructing new figurations of reality and points of passage from one system of sensing into another.” (p. 62)
“Inhabiting an image means accepting the image being of all material surfaces, and one’s own actions, and constitution, within them.” (p. 79).
“To act, to live is to continuously image and be imaged. This changes a substantive thing: the relation between an event and an image is not one of action and its representation, but rather one in which the action of matter, from the most abstract to the most obviously physical, continuously images itself. This state paradoxically suggests that we need to be reading reality as a self-referential image: a meta-image. Here, the image is figured as a sensory trace, or cluster of sensory traces, that in certain perspectival conditions gains a capacity to cohere or perhaps to persist.
But – being material – images have real physical resistance, even when they are encoded data and their material surface, their micro-topography, can take part in and shape an event without going through communicative meaning.” (p. 80).
“Hyperaesthesia describes a neurological condition in which sense perception radically overloads.” (p. 83).
“These aesthetic decision-making processes are not open to scrutiny, perhaps in an analogous way to that in which eighteenth-and nineteenth century aesthetics conceived itself as beyond reason and beyond calculation. Each of these stages of translation is aesthetic, but not because they necessarily involve an evaluative judgement of beauty passed through human discretion. These registers are aesthetic because they involve the complex politics of sense and sense-making across contexts that are themselves the result of the ongoing accumulations of such processes. Any challenge to aesthetic power will have to learn to recognise this and come from within the aesthetic field of operation.” (p. 102-103).
“The formation of common sense can be seen as a mode of creation, the ongoing development of a commonality – built into the creation of knowledge. Indeed, when common sense becomes recognised as a problem of creation, rather than being a repressive set of implicit norms that are taken for granted, it becomes open for reinvention.” (p. 196).
Huffschmid, Anne (2020). The Human Remains. Forensic Landscapes and Counter-Forensic Agencies in Violent Presents – The Mexican Case. Alemania: Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung.
“Forensic action of all kinds aims, very roughly speaking at the production and construction of evidence, be it for strictly legal setting, to be presented before a judge or ina trial, or in broader context: it is about evidencing the fact and events that have not been evident (tangible, seeable, sayable) before (…) it is about materializaing and revealing delibererately invisibilized double crime against people’s basic human rights (to life, for instance) and also against evidence itself” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 12).
Landscape as a strategic field
“Even if we do not intervene as active searchers of forensic anthropologists, we become part of it, and the landscapes becomes part of our imaginary world” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 14).
“The forensic field is framed by powerful visual cultures, where images actually perform and have to be considered active agents”(Huffschmid, 2020, p. 22).
photographic images turn into a contact zone with unimaginable realities” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 23).
Images “actively participate in the creation of its meaning, independent from the possibly good intentions of artists or journalists that circulate these images” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 24).
“Forensic reconstruction is, or should be, about signifying –assigning meaning and sense to apparently senseless violence but also to seemingly mere scientific or technical procedures. Accordingly, forensic sciences and practices hold narrative potential, I argue, by seeking to reconnect material and shattered traces of bodies, objects and landscapes in order to reconstruct significant stories of human beings, of politics, of violation and memory. These are stories that do not aspire to any totality but rather assume their fragility and highly fragmentary nature – there is so much that might never be known, so many bodies that will remain nameless, so many perpetrators that will never be sanctioned. And yet, forensic narratives may contribute to the expansion of the field of the knowable and, therefore, the imaginable” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 36).
“One of the most interesting lessons of the narrative process was learning that understanding, might be triggered by elements that are not necessarily textual” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 40).
“(…) we need research strategies and narratives that are able to subvert this excessive opacity or opaque excess by disconnecting and also reconnecting procedures: one th one hand, dismantling established (visual) discourses on violence, and on the other, associating the dissociated. We may call this, tentatively, work on forensic imagination” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 40).
Cinematic time between intensive and extensive trajectories
Horizontal & vertical time structures
Chronotopography as spaciotemporal maps of our structures
“One image always convoques or ocludes another image” F. Niney
“Omission, the obscure, the cut, the confrontation of two improbabilities that together result in a fragment of live, the negative to immobilize what’s vital with the resources of direct denomination, the total advantage of indirect description: all that belongs to the formal world of montage, be it in cinema, music of literature” A. Kluge
“In art there are two types of characters: the beast tamer and the gardener. I know that in circus tamers have more chances of succeeding; nevertheless, in my films and book, I behave like an passionate gardener. The context of a garden: that is montage. The way I conceive it, one does not turn to montage for mere thirst of prune, but because one knows that something can grow on its own” Alexander Kluge
“For a good gardener, context is a network, a rhyzome; the roots of a tree transform the tree top, and in autumn the top is not that it is in spring” Alexander Kluge
LEV KULESHOV
“The artist relationship to his surrounding reality, his view of the world, is not merely expressed in the entire process of shooting, but in the montage as well, in the capacity to see and to present the world around him (…) Artist with differing world-views each perceive the reality surrounding them differently; they see events differently, show them, imagine them, and join them one to another differently. Thus, film montage, as the entire work of filmmaking, is inexctricably linked to the artist’s world-view and his ideological purpose” Lev Kuleshov
“Truth is not inscribed in the people and objects that you use. It is an appearance of truth that their images acquire when you link them in certain order. Conversely, the appearance of truth that their images take when you link them in certain order, confers those people and objects a reality” Robert Bresson
Esfir Schub
History as primary force in filmmaking
SERGEI EISENSTEIN
Montage of attractions — creating shocks – an aggressive moment – “an element that generates in the audience an emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectators in the correct order with the whole. These shocks provide the only opportunity to perceive the ideological aspect of what is shown, the final ideological conclusion” SE
…As in Grosz’s sketches or Rodchenko’s photographs…
Film, as theater, “makes sense only as a form of pressure” SE
From this point of view a film cannot be a simple presentation or demostration of events: rather it must be a tendentious selection of, and comparison between, events, free from narrowly plot-related plans and moulding the audience in accordance with its purpose
Levels of conflict:
social mission
nature
methodology
Formal strategies of conflict:
graphic directions
scales
volumes
masses
depth
luminosity
tempo
Complimentary conflicts:
between theme and point of view
theme and spatial nature
between event and its temporal nature
between the whole optic complex and a totally different sphere
Levels of montage:
Metric – absolute length
Rhythmic – real length
Tonal – emotions of fragment
Over-tonal – overall emotions
Intellectual – context and juxtaposition
Pasolini spoke about connoted and denoted montage
DZIGA VERTOV
“Kinoks understand montage as the organization of the visible world”
Moments of montage:
In the moment of observation – disarmed eye
Montage after observation – mental organization based on characteristic clues
Montage during filming – orientation of armed eye – adaptation
Montage after filming – orienting what’s filmed based on initial clues – quest for the missing fragments
Gaze – instantaneous orientation of any visual media to capture link images
The definite montage – manifestation of small themes in the same plane that the big ones. Reorganation of all the material in its best succession. Underlining of the film’s pivot. Regrouping of situations of the same nature and cyphered calculus of montage groupings
Three categories of observation:
of a place
of people and persons in movement
of a theme, independent of people or objects
ARTAVAZD PELESHIAN
Distance montage – not about uniting, but separating
ANDREI TARKOVSKY
The sculpting in time – the passing of time in the shot – freedom as sacrifice
MAYA DEREN
Amateur versus professional
Creative cutting
If the function of the camera can be spoken of as the seeing, registering eye, then the function of cutting can be said to be that of the thinking, understanding mind. By this I am saying that the meaning, the emotional value of individual impressions, the connection between individually observed facts, is, in the making of the film, the creative responsibility of cutting
Maya Deren
In cutting, then, dureation serves not only to show or identify something, but it is also a statement of value, of importance. In determining the length of duration, the relative importance of each shot must be carefully weighed (…) Timing, in the sense of duration, can actually become an even more active element when it creates tension. Here, it is a matter of the relationship between the duration of the object or action with in the shot and the duration of the shot itself.
Maya Deren
Since the people are all different, and since it is not a cumulative action — in the sense of adding up to any narrative story — the only thing which crosses the splice and makes one shot seem to come from the previous one is the movement which is never brought to a stop but is always continued by the following shot. If cutting into movement can be the principle of tension and continuity for one hundred and fifty feet of film which does not have a story direction, then surely it can do wonders for the solution of simpler sequences in which interest is also maintained by character action, story plot and known characters
Maya Deren
Harun Farocki
Soft Montage
Pablo MZ
montage through cracks / liquid montage
Santiago Alvarez
One example from Latam Cinema (others: Glauber Rocha, Fernando Solanas, Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, Tomas Gutierrez Alea…) to speak about montage as political act
MODULAR MEDIA DESIGN / PRESERVATION
MODULAR MEDIA DESIGN:
Narrative Universe / Narrative Modules / Narrative Units / Links
