Text by Gary J. Shipley
Images by Devin Horan
With an introduction by Steve Finbow

Standard Edition
Softbound with flaps, 128 pages, 148 x 206
Collector’s Edition
Book + original artwork

https://www.infinitylandpress.com/mutations

 

 

“Mutations is a rewriting of the Real, a reimagining of the Imaginary, a shocking virus of words that transfigures our perceptions of good and evil, a contagion of collages that fixes our gaze even when all we want to do is look away.”
– Steve Finbow

“Gary J Shipley’s writing has a way of making every form he works within advance, in an overarching sense, such that the next exciting thing you read, no matter how advanced, is rendered a jalopy, and never more convincingly than in Mutations.”
– Dennis Cooper

These letters and images create, by their forms and the mutations of these forms originating in the body, a fluctuating picture that must correspond objectively to a transcendental collagic representation of the final and highest realities. Whoever says “loss of identity” also says Mutations, metamorphosis, transvaluation, poetic creation. Between the two there is a distance, a dangerous journey. What is the risk? Bewilderment, madness, suicide. Mutations is not striving for another being, but for another mode of being. It is more than anything something which transforms the body. It is the sustained, discrete violence of an incision that is not apparent in the body of the text, a calculated insemination of the proliferating collages through which the texts are transformed, deform each other, contaminate each other’s content, tend at times to reject each other, or pass elliptically one into the other and become regenerated in the repetition.

 

 

You are not the diagnosis. Everyone in the room will want you to be, but it won’t happen. The doctor will say the MRI scan was… problematic. She will pause like that. She will be reluctant to use the word tumour. Reluctant because cancer spreads, it doesn’t roam. And this was moving around inside your head. Appeared independent of the tissues of your brain. But that couldn’t be right. They will need to do another scan, but you will refuse. You will know already what you need to know. You will drum your fingers on the desk, and you will say: “In this in-between, chaos becomes rhythm.” The remark will be met with consternation. Nobody will talk for at least twenty seconds. As you get up to leave the room, the doctor will also rise from her chair. You will hear her entreating you to come back as you close the door behind you. Once you leave the building you will never go back.

To be between mutations is to be an even purer possibility. You will feel it. You will feel it like a headache of someone recently decapitated, like the headless part of that equation. Your head is so sweet you can barely swallow it. The facts of the people in that room, the lightbox on the wall, the shining pamphlets, the mannerisms of the auto shop, have degraded in the hours since you left. For your “confectionery head / that draws the cup of fever / is the suicide of truth”. What a thing it is, to just be what you are and nothing else; what an accursed state, what a sterile immutability, what a faded god.

 

 

You will dream of plagues. Your eyes will barely function from lack of sleep. You will hear them open and close. Like Saint-Remys you will know that “even destroyed, even annihilated, organically pulverized and consumed to [our] very marrow, […] we do not die in our dreams, that our will operates even in absurdity, even in the negation of possibility, even in the transmutation of the lies from which truth can be remade”. As long as you refuse to wake up you will not die. You will wonder if you have ever woken up—even during those times when it seemed as though a bulb of the harshest, nastiest light had been switched on inside your head and would not go out, when you’d seen the outside bathed in that sick glow for months, for years, that perhaps even then you had not really come around. Perhaps even then death had not been near enough to smell you. The women with their faces cut off for fun: perhaps they didn’t feel it happen. And the eyes: who’s to say they ever saw anything.

You will find eyes distributed about your rooms. An eye will look out from a wall. You will not ever see it blink. You will come to see the eyes as yours. But it won’t be through them that you’ll see what it is you’ll come to see. It will not ingratiate itself to light or the dimensions inseparable from vision. You’ll see it without seeing it. Its outline will move and fade and militate against its being one. Anomalous, it will have “no critical incidence in the system. Its figure is rather that of a mutant”. If it is to be thought of as tentacled, those tentacles will reach inward—as if to pull itself apart. You will fill a bathtub full of sick from the prolonged unlocatedness of this, from the swell of every durative thought.

 

 

“Thus there will come strange jolts, paradoxical mutations, flights that are returns.”15 And you will find yourself back where you started, with torsos shuffling across ceilings and vulvas blooming on withered plants. You will remember the oncologist talking about the finger-like spread of a hypoattenuating peritumoral edema in the white matter that surrounds it. Cracks will appear in walls, in windows, in the floor. Your rooms will fall away beneath you. You will look down at your feet as if down a lift shaft. The world, then, when it returns will do so in bits, in horrific fragments of itself come together in some aleatory nightmare of ever more spasmodic forms. What available light there is will eat your eyes out of their sockets. You will look out from this nowhere of vermicular digestion and vomit your organs into your lap. When your sight returns you will see your vomit is also made of worms, and those worms are made of worms, and so on downward, inward, until you are sick again, and more worms and more sick and so on until your bulimic interiority will speak—and you cannot speak.

“The ‘worm’ constructs itself out of various previously autonomous systems […] until it coincides—at its most abstract—with a potential for pure contagion. It specializes in nonspecialization, assembling itself out of everything it infects, its nature continuously mutating as it assimilates new material.”16 But then the worm must ask itself: How to infect yourself with everything and once infected turn away from it—to have this aggregation somehow turn away from itself. To live inside this suiciding. To know everything about what it is to know nothing: expert in your own disinterest, in the broad strokes of your ignorance, in the painstaking detail of it. The impossibility of being this meticulously oblivious, this assiduously weary. You will welcome your voided acumen with a kiss. You will that your infinitude become contagious.

 

 

You will imagine returning to the hospital, to the oncology ward, your legs giving out from under you in the waiting room, looking up at all the “wan-faced pseudo mutants with eyes like blind fish” tepidly waiting for their treatments. However scared you get you will not suffer the indignity of that. “Mutants built their own shelters out of saliva and ash”; they do not need their gamma knives and radiotherapy, their shunts and their chemo, their considered prognoses and statistical variance. Mutation like life is dangerous. Mutation is the noise of the message conveying its own message. There is no such thing as a managed end, only an end to management, a wilful relinquishment of control. “Stop sending your ships through the narrow cosmo-logical corridor. Stop making them climb the extreme walls of the world. Let them jump over the cosmic barrier and enter into the hyperspace of the Universe. Cease having them compete with light, for your rockets too can realize the more-than-psychic, postural mutation, and shift from light to black universe which is no longer a color; from cosmic color to postural and subjective black. Let your rockets become subject of the Universe and be present at every point of the Remote.” The ziplock bag in the kitchen cupboard with your ovaries inside, you can eat them whenever you like.

Your skin will turn the grey of Margate beach. The grey of the forgotten economy-meat-eating patrons of its greasy spoons. The grey of faded newspaper print and burnt-down cigarettes and 60s Brutalist high-rise flats. The grey of the diseased matter in your head. The grey of the dream you have of somewhere else. And as for the colours that aren’t grey—because for all its symbolic felicity no seaside town is shaded so homogenous—they are the greyest versions of themselves, and could not be greyer without thereby ceasing to be examples of variance, however nugatory. Just to smell you is to sense the spiders getting fat.

 

 

What happens next is dictated by the process. It cannot be documented in advance, and any stipulations around it must remain tentative at best, as “the initial escape from form is represented by a process of unpredictable mutation”. You see snakes caught in webs the rats have made. You see them in the intestines of a suspended horse. The severed heads in a row in front of you wear the same expression. All the disembodied organs are similarly fetal. Every fragment dismembers; every dismemberment fragments. Then it’s all a blur. There are fleeting resemblances. You’re choking: there’s a cock in your mouth facing the wrong way. You’re surrounded by desert. Its contours are reflected in the sky. The vision is particulate and strained and discharged of belonging. There are areas of blackness scratched at to establish flimsy increments of light. “Beyond the mutant there is a superior amorphousness, belonging to the monster that has no intrinsic form of its own, or even an inherent morphological trajectory.”

The six-legged men will gather among the trees and masturbate each other with their broken teeth. The world is ending tomorrow and the drunks are drunk. Old women are groping at a child. Ice cream is melting down its arm. At the edge of what you can see: translucent worms eating eyeballs out of heads. The world is ending tomorrow and the horror of boredom. A woman no longer has the bulk to keep her trousers up; she lets them drop only so far; she plays the fistula in her arm like a penny whistle. Hurry, the sea is turning black! Hurry, the memory is in my throat!

 

 

The sun will create a shaft of warmth and light through the room. When you place your hands in it you will be able to feel them again. Your head inside it will be freed of the weight of its being there. You will fill the room like smoke. It’s your face on Sivart’s two screens. You are telling him he needs to wake up. You are the plumes rising from his ashtray. You are the faint clouds of water vapour coming out the mouth of the old woman. She is stroking her lap as if there’s a cat. You will tell Travis that it’s okay for him to masturbate over those Nilsen drawings in his book. You will order him to do it while you watch. You will talk him through it, you will seduce him. When he’s finished you will both be sick in your mouths and swallow it. Curling up into a ball you will hug your own cadaver. Your eyes will float in a pool of someone else’s blood. You are every individual part of the smoke now trailing down the hallway, down the stairs. You will be breathed in by the baby on the ground floor so that its head will explode when the father throws it at the wall.

You repeat to yourself how it is that “without a profound complicity with natural forces such as violent death, gushing blood, sudden catastrophes and the horrible cries of pain that accompany them, terrifying ruptures of what had seemed to be immutable, the fall into stinking filth of what had been elevated—without a sadistic understanding of an incontestably thundering and torrential nature, there could be no revolutionaries, there could only be a revolting utopian sentimentality”. And yet you cannot help feeling that in spite of your mutability you are ascending, and that this suffering is flagrantly unnatural—that these accumulating horrors are some bleed-through from some other world, and syrupy too, and idyllic, for what do they stand for but a superstructure that somehow censures this behaviour from afar. Horrors shored up by the dream that they might not happen.

 

 

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Biographies

Gary J. Shipley is the author of twelve books, most recently Stratagem of the Corpse: Dying With Baudrillard (Anthem), 30 Fake Beheadings (Spork) and Warewolff! (Hexus). He has been published in numerous literary magazines, anthologies and academic journals. More information can be found at Thek Prosthetics.

Devin Horan made the films Boundary (2009), Late and Deep (2011), Grodek (2014), Akra (2017), and The Animals Are Sick With Love (2020) and was the editor of Pages of Natural History (Pagine di storia naturale, 2019). His collages are an ongoing project begun in 2013 entitled Insomnia of Worlds, which will consist of 1000 pieces. https://jesuve.tumblr.com/

Steve Finbow’s fiction includes Balzac of the Badlands (Future Fiction London, 2009), Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom (Grievous Jones Press, 2011), Nothing Matters (Snubnose Press, 2012) and Down Among the Dead (Fahrenheit 13, 2014). His biography of Allen Ginsberg in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series was published in 2011. His other works include Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia (Zero Books, 2014) and Notes from the Sick Room (Repeater Books, 2017) And Death Mort Tod – A European Book of the Dead (Infinity Land Press 2019). The Mindshaft will be published by Amphetamine Sulphate in 2019. He lives in Langres, France.

 

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Infinity Land Press website
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/

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p.s. Hey. ** Today the blog enacts one of its occasional hobbies of serving as an usher to a newly born book, in this case an excellent tome by the mega-scribe Gary Shipley and the fine artist/filmmaker Devin Horan as produced by the unimpeachable Infinity Land Press, a fount of just about the most sumptuous looking books out there. A win win win, in other words. Please pore through the evidence of ‘Mutations’ and give serious consideration to the idea of giving it a home in your home. Thanks! ** h (now j), Hi. Ah, you’ve actually seen his films projected. That’s something. I think I only saw one of them that way so far. So sad: that overly surgery body feeling post-eating something sweet. It doesn’t seem fair. I guess it’s ‘god’s’ way of keep us non-obese. I’m happy you’re enjoying the Steve Abbott book. He is much missed. Wonderful guy too. I enjoyed my espresso, and it was a double! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I should have and did assume(d) you’d know his films. And yes about the Mekas. And yes, RIP Morricone. That’s a big one. Startling how much great and varying work he did. ** Sypha, Hi. Okay, I really must read him then. Inked into my search pad. Oh, right, the travel restrictions. But you played miniature golf and that’s really all that matters, isn’t it? Sort of? So you’re just gonna stay in your hood and vacation in your yard and smell the roses and so on? ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Very happy to have made the introduction. No, the Schmid post is still upcoming. I’ve been moving it around. In the next couple of weeks. Really, thank you a lot about ‘Zac’s Drug Binge’. Means a lot. Yeah, I’m really happy with the new formatting. No, I don’t mess the gifs’ original timing. I do obviously pay a lot of attention to the timings and work carefully with them and build the sequences around the gifs’ cycling in and out of sync with their compadres. Especially in the new novel. Anyway, yeah, thank you! I’m really proud of it. A screenplay! Interesting. Curious form, no? I quite like working with it too, or at least when I feel I can approach it as freely and independently as I do any other writing form. Its conventions are so entrenched, and it’s exciting to try to fight and reinvent them, if you know what I mean. So that’s going well? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Excellent about the new writing, and it’s great you have a trusted and speedy reader to feedback for you. ** Misanthrope, Ha ha. If you had known Emshwiller’s films, I might have literally fallen off my chair. Well, I didn’t make the puke post with July 4th in mind, but when I realised it was imminent, I did realise that putting it and the food one squarely in that slot might have a nice meta effect. Cheesecake is kind of evil. I think my kid logic was more like ‘I’m not going to get what I want, and here’s how I’m going to adjust to that.’ ** Bill, I’m glad his film intrigued you, obviously. Cool. Manic energy sounds like a good way to cool down the possible overly Maddin-like problem. Okey-doke. Puking while smirking and pretending to be bored is one of Gregg’s specialties. ** Right. You know what’s before you today, and I hope you will welcome it into you in some fashion or other. See you tomorrow.

 

‘In 1951, Ed Emshwiller (1925–1990), a World War II veteran and fledgling commercial illustrator from Michigan who had studied in Paris and at the Art Students League of New York, bought a house with his wife, Carol, in Levittown, a newly built community on Long Island that offered lines of credit to GIs. A prime midcentury symbol of cookie-cutter conformity, middle-class anxiety, and real-estate redlining, Levittown provided the Emshwillers with a secure base from which to launch their careers, Ed as an artist, Carol as a writer. The Emshwillers were perhaps the sole residents who fully dedicated themselves to the postwar American project of self-fulfillment and integrated personality (in a segregated community). “They were the only beatniks in Levittown,” recalled their then-teenage neighbor Bill Griffith, who went on to create the Zippy the Pinhead comics. His father, Griffith maintains, envied the Emshwillers. They didn’t commute to Manhattan every day.

‘Instead, Ed Emshwiller worked in his second-floor home studio, painting illustrations for the covers of sci-fi magazines, including Galaxy, Infinity, and Astounding Science Fiction, and cheap novels by Philip K. Dick, Leigh Brackett, and Samuel R. Delaney. Emshwiller was good at this, and successful. He won five Hugo Awards. He supported his growing family. Some months, his illustrations accounted for a third of all those published in the sci-fi pulps. He drew aliens on other planets, spacemen in cockpits zipping through the cosmos, and rats controlling men’s brains. He painted women in crazed poses with defiant looks in their eyes. A 1957 illustration titled Disintegration of a Field-Force features a blast of light behind a body-suited woman twisting and reaching in space, and it predicts the dance films he would make.

‘By the 1960s, Emshwiller, like Andy Warhol, had turned from commercial illustration to 16-mm filmmaking, blacking out the windows in his studio so he could make movies, Factory style, in Levittown. His singular body of work experimented with form, dance, narrative, and social psychology; he mixed them together, sometimes uneasily. “Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emshwiller,” a film series and exhibition curated by Jesse Pires at Lightbox Film Center and the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, celebrated Emshwiller’s lifework across the popular and the experimental, combining his genre illustrations with his films, videos, and computer animations. Shown together, they reveal Emshwiller as a voracious bohemian workaholic.

‘Self-taught, he first experimented by photographing close-ups of paint, rewinding the film in the camera, then filming dancers so they would move around the brushstrokes. He debuted Dance Chromatic in 1959 at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 in Manhattan and promptly won an award. Soon he was part of the New York avant-garde. Jonas and Adolfas Mekas modeled for one of his illustrations, appearing as a space pilot and an emaciated wraith, respectively, on the cover of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Emshwiller returned the favor by acting in Adolfas’s Hallelujah the Hills (1963).

‘Emshwiller was as prolific a filmmaker as he was an illustrator, working on more than seven dozen films and videos in his lifetime. He also became a cinematographer, shooting Jonas Mekas’s The Brig (1964) and several documentaries. He shot black-voter-registration drives in Mississippi, cinema vérité style, and Resnais-like hallways filled with banks of data-crunching computers for a PBS film on mind control. He worked for the United States Information Agency as a director-cinematographer and made Project Apollo in 1968, a stunningly original spaceflight film. Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick both came to visit him in Levittown. It seems like they were the only filmmakers he ever turned down. While he was a dean at CalArts in the 1970s, he worked on primitive computer animations with Alvy Ray Smith, one of the guys who would go on to start Pixar.

“It’s Emshwiller’s body that is vomiting out its existential memories and suspicions,” Jonas Mekas wrote in the Village Voice in 1970. Emshwiller’s busyness, his constant Brownian motion, takes away from his most lasting achievement as a film artist. Post–Maya Deren and pre–Yvonne Rainer, he is the best director of dance films in experimental and expanded cinema. The two dozen or so he made, including Chrysalis (1973) and Film with Three Dancers (1970), surpass his earlier, knottier film work with an otherworldly beauty absent from death-haunted cascades of images like Thanatopsis (1962) and Relativity (1966).

‘His dance films take place “in space”; Film with Three Dancers features Creation of the Humanoids–esque performers in monochrome leotards and silver bathing caps who are lit with colored lights similar to those in Italian space flicks and horror movies. Made with the Alwin Nikolais Dance Company and often featuring the choreographer-dancer Carolyn Carlson, three movement studies connect Emshwiller’s view of natural landscapes and space flight to the human body. In other videos, like Scape-Mates (1972) and Pilobolus and Joan (1973), which was written by Carol, Emshwiller took dance from his homemade stage into the laboratory, where the real world met a virtual one inside his computer.

‘In the latter film, members of the dance troupe Pilobolus crawl in centipede-like formation against a chroma-key backdrop of the twin towers, serenaded at times by a folk singer. In the former, dance figures blip out of colorful grids and blocks. Both films are trippy, complex, and not a little nuts. A final work, Hungers (1988), an avant-garde space opera worthy of Sun Ra, with music by Morton Subotnick sung on-screen by Joan La Barbara, expresses the human soul flying free from corporeality, free from Levittown and any known planet.’ — A. S. Hamrah, Artforum

 

____
Stills

 

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Further

Ed Emshwiller @ Wikipedia
SCIENCE-FICTION VISIONARY ED EMSHWILLER GETS RECOGNITION AS AN EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER
Ed Emshwiller @ Electronic Arts Intermix
Ed Emshwiller @ IMDb
Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emshwiller
EE @ Video Data Bank
9.8 Ed Emshwiller
Book: Emshwiller: Infinity x Two: The Art & Life of Ed & Carol Emshwiller
EE @ Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre
The Films of Ed Emshwiller
EE @ Underground Film Journal
EE @ letterboxd
The Body and the Cosmos
The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

 

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Extras

Screening Room with Ed Emshwiller (Excerpt)

Ed Emshwiller on the Dick Cavett show, May 1978

Art of Ed Emshwiller Panel

 

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“Later That Same Life”

 

Peter “Stoney” Emshwiller, is the son of experimental filmmaker and sf artist Ed Emshwiller and sf writer Carol Emshwiller.

When he was 18 years old, his father Ed shot footage of Peter interviewing his future self.

I sat in a well-lit chair in a completely black studio and, like some teenaged Johnny Carson, chatted with an invisible older me. During this one-way conversation, I asked my older self tons of questions about my future – from career to family to art to friendships to sex. Then I recorded many different reactions to each possible answer, ranging from polite nods, to joy, sadness, annoyance, surprise, and outright horror….

My filmmaker father, Ed Emshwiller, ran the camera for me and covered the first half of this interview in various ways – with close ups, wide shots, “two shots” (but with one person), over-the-shoulder foreground shots (with no one in the background), etc. And for 38 years, I waited to edit in my older self’s responses.

He writes, “A recent health scare (happily a false alarm) made me realize I ain’t gonna live forever, and that it’s time to finish this project. So I’m finally going to (gulp) face my younger self and record the other half of the conversation.”

The result is “Later That Same Life,” and he’s looking for crowdsourced funding to put it all together. Toward that end, he’s released a few minutes of highlights. The Emshwillers’ “conversation” is by turns combative, sweet and funny. Be warned that there’s some R-rated language here; on the other hand, those are some of the funniest parts:

At one point, the 56-year-old Emshwiller tells the teenager, “I’m old; I’m fat, and in your mind I’m a failure.” On the other hand, the question “Are you exceedingly rich?” elicits laughter from them both.

Asked whether he marries, the older Emshwiller begins to rhapsodize about his wife. Then, when he realizes whom he’s “talking” to, he turns stern: “Oh my God, she’s 12 years old now. Stay away from her.”

The most affecting part comes when the younger Emshwiller asks, “What’s happened to the family?” The elder version replies, “I don’t know what I should tell you.” After a long pause, he says quietly, “You should spend as much time as you can with them. Spend more time with Dad.” The teenage version stops, wipes his eyes and asks for the camera to be stopped.

On his Rockethub page, Emshwiller writes of some of the questions tackled in the film: “What is success? What is failure? Who decides how to judge a life? … And, while (we’re) chatting, what’s the deal with that beard, dude?”

Valid questions, each one.

 

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10 of Ed Emshwiller’s 23 films

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Thanatopsis (1962)
‘An expression of internal anguish. The confrontation of a man and his torment. Juxtaposed against his external composure are images of a woman and lights in distortion, with tension heightened by the sounds of power saws and a heartbeat.’ — film-makers coop

the entirety

 

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Totem (1963)
‘Ed Emshwiller described this collaboration with composer-choreographer Alwin Nikolais: “A filmic interpretation of a modern dance ballet by Alwin Nikolais. Earth, fire, water and primordial mysteries in a cine-dance.”‘ — IMDb

Watch the film here

 

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Scrambles (1964)
‘This biker documentary was selected for screening at the 1964 Flaherty Film Seminar. Emshwiller described it as “a roaring picture of motorcyclists in action. Modern Lancelots and their ladies-in-waiting go wide open for a day at the races. An impressionistic film of guys and gals who get their kicks in direct physical action.”’ — letterboxd

 

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George Dumpson’s Place (1965)
‘A poetic portrait of an outsider artist who, in Emshwiller’s words, “created a small universe with what he found and could carry on his homemade wagon.”‘ –– fmc

the entirety

 

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Relativity (1966)
‘A man wonders, measures, views relationships, people, places, things, time, himself. A sensual journey through a series of subjective reflections. “[A] beautifully photographed color montage of shots; insect, animal, man and galaxy; a sobering antidote to the orgy of subjectivism going on elsewhere.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times. “The artist’s search for the meaning of his own existence is never-ending and takes many forms. Ed Emshwiller’s remarkable epic, RELATIVITY, continues this exploration with extraordinary frankness and rare technical skill. The sequence which symbolically portrays a woman at the moment of sexual climax is one of the most beautiful in the literature of film.” — Willard Van Dyke. “RELATIVITY is a marvelously sensual film … it is, I have no doubt, a masterpiece.”‘ — Richard Whitehall

Excerpt

 

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Carol (1970)
‘Off and on, Carol and I spent a few days in the woods filming. We got some images of her, some of trees, leaves, twigs and logs. These I combined with sounds from a thumb piano, which were sometimes modified electronically. The results: what seems to me to be a gentle, lyrical film.’ — EE

the entirety

 

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Film With Three Dancers (1971)
‘In this spin-off from his original plan for Relativity (1966), Emshwiller continued with his desire to penetrate “space in a kind of flying camera, a dream of flying, a kind of sensual, sexual imagery where you were constantly going into an unknown space.” A trio of dancers (Carolyn Carlson, Emery Hermans, Bob Beswick) appear “first in leotards, then in bluejeans, then naked, as they “pass through rituals of movement.”’ — letterboxd

the entirety

 

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Scape Mates (1972)
‘In one of his first experiments in video, Emshwiller creates an electronic landscape of both abstract and figurative elements, where colorized dancers are chroma-keyed into a mutable, computer-animated environment. Working with the “Scan-i-mate,” an early analog video synthesizer, Emshwiller choreographs an architectural, illusory video space, in which frames proliferate within frames, disembodied heads and hands move within a collage of animated forms, and the dancers and their environment are subjected to constant transformations through image processing. With its witty interplay of the “real” and the “unreal” in an electronically rendered videospace, and the skillful manipulation and articulation of a sculptural illusion of three-dimensionality, Scape-mates introduced a new vocabulary of video image-making.’ — Electronic Arts Intermix

Excerpt

Watch the entirety here

 

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Sunstone (1979)
‘Sunstone is a landmark tape. Symbolic and poetic, it is a pivotal work in the development of an electronic language to articulate three-dimensional space. The opening image is an iconic face, which appears to be electronically “carved” from stone. A mystical third eye, brilliantly crafted from a digital palette, radiates with vibrant transformations of color and texture. Sculpting electronically, Emshwiller then transforms perspectival representation: the archetypal “sunstone” is revealed to be one facet of an open, revolving cube, each side of which holds a simultaneously visible, moving video image. Created with what was then complex technology over an eight-month period, this emblematic spinning cube metaphorically describes a three-dimensional, temporal space, both hyperreal and simulated. Emshwiller’s humanistic approach to technology ushered in the 1980s with a new electronic vocabulary for conceptualizing and visualizing images in space and time. Reflecting an image-saturated world, Sunstone marked a new stage in electronic art.’ — Electronic Arts Intermix

the entirety

 

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Skin Matrix (1984)
‘Emshwiller writes that the visually complex and densely textured Skin Matrix is a “video tapestry… a layering of different manifestations of energy: electronic (light, video, computer), inorganic (dunes, rocks, mud), organic (wood, plants), human (skin, hair), individual (faces, eyes), imagination (sculpture, robot).” His intricate electronic transformations of tactile surfaces, landscapes and human faces signify a metaphysical process that simultaneously masks and reveals; he achieves an uncanny spatial illusion of depth through layering and movement. Creating sophisticated image patterns and structures with the simple Bally Arcade computer (used for playing video games), Emshwiller weaves together the lush textures and kinetic energy of the organic and the technological.’ — Electronic Arts Intermix

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Ian, Hi, Ian! Nice to see you. Oh, man, you could’ve made a career out of that practice apparently. Did you document your artworks? Is that a dumb question? Big congratulations on your marriage! Are you doing (or have you been doing) a honeymoon type of thing? Love back from your country’s sibling in arms (kind of) France! ** Scunnard, Glad you liked it. My fave lit. blogs were in my mid-year list in the internet section if you want to turn back some pages. Everyone, Scunnard has a question for you: ‘What are the literary blogs you pay attention to these days? I’m out of date… what ever happened to htmlgiant and the ilk?’ ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, sir. Everyone, David’s FaBlog draws some kind of correlation between Trump’s Mt. Rushmore thing and Wes Anderson’s ‘Rushmore’, so that could be interesting. Here. ** KK, Hey, Kyle! Best of luck with the potential job. Yeah, right? About ‘Death Sentence’. Messed me up in a positive way forever. And Butor is awesome. Have you read ‘Mobile’? Nice reading you’ve got going on there. No, I don’t know Reza Negarestani, but now I will start to know thanks to you. Thanks! The odd balls in writing workshops are the ones most likely to succeed. I mean in the real sense. Cool, great that Bud Smith is being of help. New novel? No, it doesn’t come out until late next year, so I doubt I’ll hear much of anything from my editor until later this year at the earliest. But if there’s news, I’ll share it. Thanks for asking, man. I hope your week is starting majestically. ** Bill, Thanks, pal. Yeah, G&G being big carnivores does not surprise me for some reason. Did you see that recent, self-doctored video of them dancing. Pretty funny. I second the VanDerBeek recommendation. I did a Day about him if that’s helpful at all. ‘Rey’: I’ll see if I can find it. I’ve yet to see a film that was Maddinesque that didn’t suffer greatly by comparison. See: ‘The Wild Boys’. ** h (now j), Hi. Ha ha, I love that that post made you hungry! But I hope it didn’t end with you puking, obviously. Yeah, it’s almost shocking how nice and mild the summer has been so far. Enjoying every precious hour of that. Have an an excellent week’s start. ** _Black_Acrylic, I agree that’s a particularly good Creed. Man, I hope I’m wrong in thinking the pubs reopening is a guaranteed invitation to a massive spike. i just saw that there’s that new Helena Hauff set/album and was about to get it. Cool. Bon Monday! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. No, I didn’t know that. What a terrible film. I don’t if it being a ‘thing’ is good or not. Everybody in the US seemed to be going nuts about all the fireworks. Strange. No, Bastille Day means nothing to me. Closed stores. Maybe I’ll go watch the fireworks. There’s an aerial parade of extremely loud jets in the morning over the Champs Elysee, and I’m two blocks from it, so I’ll get blasted and rumbled, which could be nice. Given how well everything goes here so far and virtually everyone’s dutiful enacting of the social rules, I’m not spooked by moviegoing, although I haven’t been yet. Timely named new song there. I’ll hit it. Everyone, Mr. Erickson’s new song is … Well, I let him tell you about it. Steve: ‘I wrote a song today, “East Village Pyro,” whose title comes from that, but this is the first time I’ve tried polyrhythms. I looped a sample of congas through the whole song, and sometimes layered two of them slightly out of time. It started off as a bunch of noise, and then I wrote a chord progression. Here’s the link.’ ** Okay. I’m going to venture a wild guess that many of you do not know the films of Ed Emshwiller. And I’m going to hope that you take a little time to find out about him and films today, maybe even watch them a little via the embeds or at least pen his work in for future viewing by you. That’s the blog’s goal for this Monday. See you tomorrow.