Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

-ound film piece screened

-4 overlapping screens,

-de. A metaphorical

-hutter mechanism.

-Artpark site.

-nterface D-2 17”x21”

-phoric drawings made

-“Shutter Interface”

-ly infinite variations

-system of parameters.

My primary involvement at Artpark was the installation of a 4-screen 16 mm. color and sound film piece, “Shutter Interface.” The work had been conceived a year earlier and the scores for its footage and the shooting of that footage took place prior to my residency. What was special about the Artpark installation was that while I had conceived of the elements involved, I could not pre-conceive what final arrangement of the elements – in their actually spatial relationship to each other – would best express the central ideas of the piece; the Artpark situation allowed me to arrange the elements into a variety of relationships so that I could study each one for a significant amount of time; from this activity – or better, meditation – I finally arrived at an optimal configuration.

The central idea was to create a metaphor of the basic intermittency mechanism of the cinema: the shutter. If one slows down a projector, one observes a “flicker.” This flickering reveals the rotating shutter activity of the system. Instead of slowing down a projector, one can metaphorically suggest the frame-by-frame  structure of film (which is what necessitates a shutter blade mechanism) by differentiating each frame of the film by radical shifts in value or hue; this metaphor was a guiding principle in my work in the 1960’s, in my so-called “color flicker films.” I discovered, two years ago, that I could heighten this metaphor by partially overlapping two screens of related but different “flicker footage” and the conception of four overlapping screens began to evolve. For installation pieces, I prefer to use long film loops, each a slightly different length, so that the relationships within the system go through many phases, making the piece seem to be beyond duration, to exist as on-going environments of visual-aural activity (I regard them as “locations”). For this work, each loop projector carries about 6 minutes of material. The final configuration of overlapped screens was 64” high and 24’ wide.

While installing and observing the various configurations of “Shutter Interface,” I also shot footage of the impressive landscape at the Artpark site. Two 3-screen sketches resulted: one was a study of the slow patterns of the Niagara River; another was of rock stratification structures along the walls of the river’s gorge. The results were gratifying and may lead to work in directions entirely new to me.--P.S.