Jonathan Walley, professor of Cinema Studies and video production at Denison University, came to Oberlin this Tuesday to deliver a lecture titled “Meaning, Materiality, and Mystery: Projection Performance,” as part of Oberlin’s Film Is…Not Film: Expanded Cinema Now and Then series organized by Oberlin professor of Cinema Studies, Brett Kashmere. Walley’s lecture focused on projection performance, a new form of artistic media emerging in the contemporary conceptual art scene. Walley began with an explanation of what projection performance is and then examined how it functions within the realm of cinema.

Focusing on physical film and film projectors, projection performance is a live, ephemeral experience that expands the genre of cinema by breaking down the features of the category. Projection performance artists are interested in exploring the mechanics of projections along with perceptual filmmaking. This method of creating cinematic pieces emphasizes the materiality of film. Many projection performances are made by experimenting with the material and yielding unknown results, which Walley identified as the purpose of the art form. This kind of appreciation of entropy in art and interest in the quality of the material are defining features of modern and contemporary artistic practice.

Projection performances focus on the isolation cinema’s various materials in order to understand the qualities that make each material unique. Walley illustrated the nature of the media through critically acclaimed works of performance projection pieces by artists like Ken Jacobs, Bruce McClure, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder. The latter two artists mentioned showed their work titled THEIR PERFORMANCES MELT THE PROJECTOR’S MACHINE MATERIALISM INTO ETHEREAL EXPERIENCES… at Oberlin in West Lecture Hall on Wednesday, April 4.

Walley located the reason for the varied outcomes of each artist’s work within these artists’ methodological approach, which involves entering into the process with a sense of experimentation rather than striving to achieve an intentional, premeditated goal. Gibson and Recoder, for instance, integrate subtle manipulations into their pieces by altering the focus and adding elements of water, steam, and smoke into the projection. Annabel Nicolson’s piece Reel Time (1973) shows Nicolson using a sewing machine to punch holes into film while the film goes through a projector and projects onto a screen, ultimately falling apart because of the nature of the medium.

Nicolson’s process yields multiple products. The audience sees how she places film through the sewing machine, then what the damaged film shows through the projector and ultimately what is left of the film that is punctured with holes. Walley described the experience as a metaphorical connection to a normal film-viewing experience.

Sophomore Cinema Studies major Taylor Stanton comments, “By explaining the theory behind conceptual performance projection, I think the medium is able to reach a new level of creation, which Walley broke down in his talk.” Walley insisted that projection performance provoked a tension not found in traditional uses of film. There is a merging of mediums, primarily filmmaking and performance. Such a connection of materials allows the genre to develop into a larger sphere of conceptual art.

Rather than creating an illusion through cinema, which is what most mainstream films generate, projection performance incorporates the same medium but manipulates it to achieve abstract forms and expression.