Neither with John Cage

One 11 and 103 is a film and sound composition produced by John Cage, under the direction of Henning Lohner. It is Cage’s only feature-length film, made the year of his death. In it, light moves to and fro, never fully gleaming but lighting an empty wall in shadow, from inner to outer shadow. The space is lit, as between gently closing and parting doors, light fades then unfades. It is a film about “the effect of light in an empty space. But no space is actually empty and the light will show what is in it” (Cage).

The only thing left is the back and forth relation of camera and light, light and eye. Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine II is a video essay that combines Gulf War television footage, computer simulations of tank and aircraft weapons, and images from the first bomb with a camera installed in 1942. The montage runs through image making and optical technologies, implying that images, production, real and virtual representations of war are now blurred and indistinct – “there must be a connection between production and war”.

In 99 Clerkenwell Road by Sophie Michael, multi-coloured and bright circular shapes move unheeded, gently across, around and overlapping a dark frame; recalling early experimental and abstract films of artists such as Oskar Fischinger. Details and parts of fixtures, edges and boundaries of a lit room gradually reveal themselves from the otherwise impenetrable background as the film outlines a physically located space in which the camera movement produces the moving shapes.

This exhibition is at:
##seventeen
270-276 Kingsland Road
London
E8 4DG ✪