Retrogame Time Lapse Photographs - Rosemarie Fiore
As Teju Cole states in his essay Disappearing Shanghai, “There is no instantaneous photograph: each must be exposed for a length of time, no matter how brief.” With rare exceptions, artists who work with videogame screenshots tend to operate in a timeless world. Any motion blur in their frames made by pressing F12 is a deliberate product of the animation, like photographing speed lines in anime. But in Rosemarie Fiore’s Retrogame Time Lapse Photographs (2001-2) project, she explicitly sets out to explore the collision of Cole’s physical observation and the chronological abstraction sliced from a stack of digital frames. By venturing forth into the natural habitat for classic games (which, I should note is a place culturally coded masculine), the arcade, lugging a tripod and camera (another field historically steeped in machismo), she leverages the complex slippage of time between the game-space and the body standing in front of the arcade machine to produce a new, less nostalgic, way of re-experiencing these coin-operated artifacts. At a formal level, these large scale photographs shimmer like dreamy oil slicks reflecting geometric neon lights, registering all of the jagged in-between changes in the displays that our eye so quickly ignores, revealing the large-scale design geometries produced by the game systems. Similarly, these images are so intriguing because they demonstrate the oft-hidden generative potential in our collaborative (or as Brendan Keogh describes it, cybernetic) performance with, not mastery of, videogames and other ghosts of the omnipresent techno-fetishized screen.
Artist: Raosemarie Fiore
Link: https://www.rosemariefiore.com/projects-1999-2007-/photographs/1
Connections:
Imogen Cunningham - A Man Ray Version of Man Ray
Teju Cole - Disappearing Shanghai
Fernand Leger & Dudley Murphy - Ballet Mécanique