Reassembling Components, Hybridizing the Human and the Machine: Cross-disciplining Expanded Cinema and the Possibilities for a Discourse of Interfacing

Since the beginning of the 21^st century, Expanded Cinema, a term meant to encompass various non-normative practices of cinema spanning from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s - multi-screen projections, film/video performances, live projection events, installations, intermedia environments, electronic/computer film - has been given dramatically growing attention both by institutions shaping discourses and exhibitions concerned with new media art and by museums for supporting and developing mainstream contemporary art scenes. While commonly shedding new light on those practices that had long been heterogeneous and thus marginal in the histories of cinema and contemporary art, these two worlds have seemed to spiral closely around each other without ever quite meeting, therefore deepening the schism between two tendencies of Expanded Cinema: the avant-garde cinema and the digitally driven cinematic experimentations. In order to overcome this schism, this paper throws new light on similarities shared by those two tendencies, as the groundwork for a hybrid discourse that offers insights into the impure and dynamic ontology of cinema and the cross-disciplinary approaches to art that have questioned the idea of medium specificity. Here the discourse I propose for elaborating on the commensurability between - and the intersection of - the two tendencies while maintaining their differences is one of "interfacing" that is grounded in two overlapping meanings: interfacing (implying both deconstruction and reassembling) material, technical, and aesthetic components of mediums or media technologies that were perceived as separate, and interfacing (or hybridizing) the human and the machine for the sake of investigating and incorporating the idea of the "active spectator" that fundamentally called into question the subjectivity of spectatorship framed by the apparatus as the techno-institutional-discursive complex constituting the limits of arts including cinema. For substantiating the "discourse of interfacing" applied to both tendencies of Expanded Cinema, I will briefly compare two British avant-garde filmmakers (Steve Farrer and Lis Rhodes) with a couple of digital media artists (Simon Penny and Ryoji Ikeda) in terms of their explorations of the particular devices, such as panoramic projection space and synthetic audiovisual projection, which bring into play the phenomenological interaction between image and spectator.