Skip to main content

Lossless #4

Rebecca Baron

2008 00:14:50 United StatesEnglishB&WSilent4:3

Description

Derived from Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, Lossless #4 is the result of a digital file's debugging routine that reveals vectors describing apparent movement in the frame. Having removed the picture, thereby isolating these vectors, the formal qualities of Gehr's film are detectable. The hypnotic effects of the shifts in the lens’s focal length in the original are now substituted with a purely graphical representation, creating a perverse replacement of the optical effect of the original.

"In Baron and Goodwin's Lossless series the “materiality” of the digital becomes the source-code for experimental execution. The artists' renditions of appropriated films are certainly not “lossless” (i.e. a copy of the original in which nothing is lost), but rather gainful: through various techniques of digital disruption - compression, file-sharing, the removal of essential digital information - the artists' reveal the gain of a “new” media, full of material forms ripe for aesthetic sleuthing."

--Braxton Soderman

About Rebecca Baron

Rebecca Baron is known for her essay films concerned with the construction of history, with a particular interest in still photography and its relationship to the moving image. Her work has screened widely at international film festivals and media venues including Documenta 12, New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, Toronto Film Festival, London Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty Film Seminar and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2010, the Austrian Film Museum presented a retrospective of her work.