Radio Pictures, Blank Transmissions

Abstract

Abstract A key aspect of avant-garde practice is the critique of the relation between medium and genre. Following Cage’s chance-procedural experiments, Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell explored a radical repurposing of medium as technology, transforming TV and radio from sites of broadcast performance to sources of indeterminate electronic sound and image. This in turn fed into a reconception of the verbo-visuo dichotomy as text-effect, or cinemato/graphy, and a parallel conceptualisation of text as sites of transmission. While new media tends towards instantaneous full-immersion virtual reality, mimetic technologies remain haunted by what does not transmit—between sound/image, speech/writing, and in the work of erasure, silence, blankness and noise (all of which acquire the status of aesthetic information). In this relation I propose to examine a piece nominally cast as “cinema”: Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), a 79-minute poetic meditation in the voices of Jarman, John Quentin, Nigel Terry and Tilda Swinton over a monochrome blue screen (inspired by Yves Klein’s Symphonie Monotone and the tonal quality of IKB). The production of Blue, in the form ostensibly of both a “transmission error” and a “radio picture,” speaks to the idea of invisible cinema. In doing so, Blue harks back to Guy Debord’s anti-cinematic pronouncement ‘there’s no more cinema, cinema’s dead’: a blank cinema broadcasting from beyond the grave.