Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

TO: Rae Tyson, Visual Arts Coordinator,                  Oct. 30, 1975

FROM: Paul Sharits, 537 Lafayette Ave., Buffalo, NY. 14222

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 01 a year earlier and the scores for its footage and the shooting of that footage took place prior to my artist-in-residency. What was special about the Artpark installation was that while I had conceived of the elements involved, I could not preconceive what final arrangement of the elements -- in their actually spatial relationship to each other -- would best express the central ideas of the piece; and 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.

(NOTE TO EDITOR – I HAVE CHOSEN NOT TO INTO AN ACCOUNT OF THE TECHNICALITIES OF THE INSTALLATION BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT PARTICULARY RELEVANT TO THE WORK – ALSO, THE DRAWINGS OF THE SET-UP ARE SOMEWHAT SELF-EXPLANATROY)

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.

* NOTE NEW TITLE – NO LONGER “Pink Interface” but now “Shutter Interface”

**see attached Xerox (from drawing concerning the theory of the piece) for more exacting explanation of shutter/flicker.