Ken Jacobs: 3-D is Intoxicating
First Man: Have I got a deal for you, an elephant for only $500!
Second Man: I haven’t the room, and what would I want with an elephant?
First Man: Okay, how about two for $500?
Second Man: Now you’re talking!
The fact is that the Second Man is no fool but is a 3D enthusiast and a magician of sorts.
He plans on arranging his elephants so that a paying public sees the two as one, one to each eye.
He figures that if the elephants are not in exact parallel but are only slightly shifted one to the other, viewers will think they’re seeing one elephant that’s strangely distended, a cross between an elephant and a dachshund.
3D IS INTOXICATING
I feel almost at the point where I could forgive Jonas for putting down my interest in 3D and its paraphernalia in a review he wrote for The Village Voice in 1975. It was after the New York presentation of SOUTHWARK FAIR, Chapter One of The Impossible. He wrote that the performance was much better seen without spectacles. It was the first Nervous System piece, performed with two filmprints of TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON on two stop-motion projectors hand-triggered to pass very slowly, stop and go, one frame out of synch. The small differences frame to frame in the positions of things onscreen could be exploited to create depth events. Crazy depths appeared with foreground and background objects plumb forgetting their places. It was the Harpo Marx of abstract cinema. No, I think I’ll wait another 36 years.
I’d taken the plunge into illusionary depth 6 years earlier. What had happened was that Flo sent me to the drugstore and next to the cash register was a card holding glitzed-up cardboard spectacles with the words See TV In 3D One Dollar. I smirked, naturally, normal person that I am, walked out, circled, paid the dollar, and never have seen the specs for sale since. We didn’t have many dollars and Flo said, “More magic beans, Ken?" Yes! I can say to her now and she would leap to agree.
Strangely the same Jonas gave me a book that explained how the specs -sometimes- worked. EYE AND BRAIN by E.L.Gregory described the Pulfrich Pendulum Effect, how an eye looking through a dark filter sent information to the brain an instant later than an eye meeting with no interference, meaning that it was possible to simultaneously be in two instances in time. (What?) If a visual object moved during that interval one could be given the equivalent of two perspectives. A pendulum swinging back and forth would appear to be circling, shift the filter before the other eye and it would circle in the other direction.
One could simultaneously see two frames of a normally projected film.
Depth-conscious from my painting studies with Hans Hofmann, this program begins with works from 1964 and 1965 that demonstrate this awareness creatively, but they don’t enter into illusion and when See TV In 3D One Dollar got me into that I wondered would I be offending Hofmann. What was clear was the generally dismissive contempt for 3D in the wake of bad movies and careless projections; headache was the other word for 3D. If my 1969 filming of TOM, TOM was about the weirdness of human activity in a grainy black and white and 2D medium, those bothered by the film ("boring, boring”) could now shunt me aside as a fellow totally off on another wacky bender. Yes, 3D illusion had grabbed me, visually and aurally, though not in the way it usually interests others; it wasn’t so much fidelity to nature but unnatural depth phenomena that drew me on, the tricks that could be played on the mind when, as I put it then, one stepped between the eyes. And if infidelity to nature was the interest (coming from modern painting), the territory entered was virginal. With Flo’s involvement many fresh paths were entered, 3D shadowplay being only one. It had been commercially presented in the 1920’s, nudie cuties with balloons, but we did truly incredible things, in one instance plunging viewers into a forest of towering typewriter keys. A videotaped performance in Vienna is scheduled for presentation.
The Nervous System began with a shuttle between projectors and then switched to the exterior shutter when Alfonse Shilling discovered and urged me to incorporate it. The effect went from 2D forms placed in depth to voluptuous rounded forms in a delirious and drunken space. We’ve digitally rescued some Nervous System pieces from performance transiency and will rescue others. They can’t help but change from what they were, sometimes to the point they must be re-named. After 25 years we stopped giving Nervous System performances sometime after The Nervous Magic Lantern evolved. I first ventured into it in 1990 for the intro to NEW YORK GHETTO FISHMARKET 1903 (dropped for making the work too long) and the piece CHRONOMETER but then almost 10 years passed before returning to it. Only one projector is used with no moving parts other than myself and the turning shutter before the lens. Now, when invited to perform (mostly in Europe), it’s what we do. TIME SQUARED was first presented at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in January of this year.
One technique I’ve had to abandon is free-viewing. This is when left-right images are placed side by side, most often reading right-left and an observer joins the images with slightly crossed eyes. Effortless for me, difficult for most, impossible for way too many. Some of these pieces will be shown recomposed for anaglyph (red/green) viewing.
AVATAR did a lot to make 3D less ridiculed. I liked and admired it, especially the story, but I don’t see many of the 3D movies that have followed. Again, proper depth depiction is not really my interest. I love my Fuji 3D and Aiptek video-cameras. Before they came to market I was recording with two upright Vado pocket cameras mounted side by side and I still choose them for some situations.
My pieces almost always veer into and out of 2D. 2D is a remarkable invention, crazier than most anything that can happen in 3D. Imagine the world flattened to a single insubstantial plane, a mere surface reflection! I must look into it.
But can’t.
by Ken Jacobs