Fragile Systems: The Media Hybrids of Christine Lucy Latimer

Art & Trash, episode 25
Fragile Systems: The Media Hybrids of Christine Lucy Latimer
Stephen Broomer, January 19, 2024

The films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer defy their containers: they reveal the fragile systems underlying media; they press the boundaries of image-making machines; they embrace the faults and frailties of vision. Almost all of Latimer’s work is silent, but nothing is truly silent: Latimer draws out images that recall the hums, tweets, and mechanical moans of the technology with which she made them. Latimer’s work began long after most of the formats she pursues had become obsolescent. Refusing the universal nostalgia of the antique camera and the antique image, her works are undeniably present-facing and playfully disobedient, ethereal, abstract. Supremely self-conscious and yet mystical, they are seances that draw out the ghosts in the machine.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer charts Latimer’s aesthetic development from 2002 to the present, from films and videos that bear an overt eroticism (the scrambled kickboxing of Mosaic, the glow of a stripping woman filtered through a toy camera in Ghostmeat) to explorations of the patina of resilient media (the damaged digital photos of House Pieces, the foldable hologram imprints of Tender).

The Magik Iffektor (Christine Lucy Latimer, 2011)

SCRIPT:

The films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer defy their containers: they reveal the fragile systems underlying media; they press the boundaries of image-making machines; they embrace the faults and frailties of vision. Almost all of Latimer’s work is silent, but nothing is truly silent: Latimer draws out images that recall the hums, tweets, and mechanical moans of the technology with which she made them. She began to issue work in the early 2000s, long after most of the formats she pursues had become obsolescent, and the bulk of her work exists as media hybrids, combining a variety of image-making processes, be they 16mm film, toy camera video, or camcorders and phone cameras. Some end up as 16mm film reels, some end up as VHS tapes. Refusing the universal nostalgia of the antique camera and the antique image, her media hybrids are undeniably present-facing and playfully disobedient, ethereal, abstract. Supremely self-conscious and yet mystical, they are seances that draw out the ghosts in these machines.

Mosaic (Christine Lucy Latimer, 2002)

Latimer’s first hybrids contest any accusations of nostalgia. Their building blocks are out-of-time, past media converging out of the ashes of digital futurity, often mixing overt eroticism with the harsh representational boundaries of these containers. Mosaic (2002), features the scrambled digital cable signal of a televised kickboxing fight. The fight has gone through several translations of media, from the signal to VHS, then from VHS to 16mm black and white film, which Latimer has hand-printed. The scrambled signal offers one level of abstraction, shattering the grid of the ropes, splintering the forms of these bodies so they become one dynamic presence, connecting and separating in the dance of the ring. Latimer’s ensuing processes impose other aesthetics on the image. The image will seize up and throb, the entangled bodies of the fighters swelling with light in a haunting variation on the freeze frame’s punctuative force. Her translation between media is like the flex of a bellows: the high-quality root image vanishes into a web of constrictive, low-resolution media, expanded with its limits to the light-rich field of the 16mm film strip. This collage sensibility was most present in Latimer’s early works, for example, in the compartmentalized composition of Ghostmeat (2003), which integrates a liquid light array on the right, and on the left, a projected stag film of a woman slowly undressing, which the filmmaker salvaged from a mutoscope. Far from that pornographic provenance, the film finds a new intimacy to the left of the porous forms cast by the liquid light array, a simple and prolonged diptych captured by Latimer in the low resolution of a pixelvision toy camera. 

Early in her work, Latimer embraced silence. There is, in some of her work, a suggestion that the moving image is returning to its root form: stripped down, as Rudolph Arnheim would have wanted, to its purest distinctions from real life; the black and white silent image casting carefully deliberated compositions, an aesthetic which the viewer cannot confuse with direct witness. In the final moments of Ghostmeat, the woman curls up on a couch, and from head to toe her body seems transformed by pixelvision into a modern silhouette. Latimer would pursue this same aesthetic—which is somewhere between collage and space study—in (Just beyond the screen) the universe - as we know it - is ending (2008), a hybrid that combines found film and digitally generated video to create what Latimer calls “a rainbow digital apocalypse.” The durational aspect of Ghostmeat and the universe are worth lingering on: both are architectural in the sense that we become conscious that the room in which they were filmed has served as a kind of canvas. But those transitional spaces remain mysterious; in the universe, the crop of the projection makes the fragments that pass into this room all the more mysterious; on the other side of a barrier, perhaps in an adjoining room, an eerie glow emanates, a sign that Latimer is not restricted to conventional image-casting tools in her process. 

Over {Past:Future} Sight (Christine Lucy Latimer, 2006-07)

Without fixating on a single apparatus, Christine Lucy Latimer is freed up to embrace highly unconventional tools. A surgeon’s video microscope serves as the primary taking-instrument in Over {Past:Future} Sight (2006-07), a document of Latimer’s father’s laser eye surgery. Phil Latimer’s eyelid courses with energy, his reactions magnified in extremity. While the wet reflections glimpsed in the masking of his pupil provide an organic mirror to the projection format—16mm film—the majority of the film’s dynamism and tension is controlled by the tools that obstruct the frame: the graphical impositions in the microscope and the physical tools to measure and prepare the procedure. The translation of this footage to colour negative, through the processes that Latimer has imposed on it, causes it to pick up a brown patina, a quality that makes it feel antique, a planned anachronism with the futurism of its graphics and tools. But the central theme of Over {Past:Future} Sight is ultimately reconstruction, the translation and maintenance of the faculties over time. In two works made shortly after it, Latimer began to experiment with direct-application to the film strip in a manner that seems to extend the theme of reconstruction, first in Focus (2009), placing individually extricated frames of super 8 on clear leader; then in Fruit Flies (2010), a variation on Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963), in which Latimer uses splicing tape to adhere the husks of fruit flies to 16mm film. In Focus, the translation between media is a matter of disjunctive scale: the super 8 frame assumes a new self-consciousness for being buttressed in clear plastic, light shining through on all sides, the frameline, the sprockets, and the artist’s own trail of glue making her process transparent, commanding the viewer to focus on and comprehend the homunculus frame. Fruit Flies, despite sharing a process with Brakhage, is distinguished by its playfulness: the mystical and deadly serious traits of Mothlight are present in Brakhage’s shattering of moths, the fact that his film is not representational in its relation to the moth husk and wings, but that it is, throughout its length, made from the viscera, gore, and tint of the moth. By comparison, Fruit Flies is a kind of dance: Latimer has maintained the flies’ forms, and their movements suggest a steady rhythm, two or three flies per frame giving the illusion of continuity until they begin to splinter into clouds of dust.

In the next phase of her work, beginning in 2011, Latimer used, for a number of pieces, a custom-built analog video signal attenuator (the “vidiffektor”), built for her by James Schidlowsky. This tool breaks the video signal down into finely-distinguished waves that resemble the interwoven lines of fingerprints. For The Pool (2011), Latimer began with 16mm found footage of synchronized swimmers from the 1950s and develops it through her hybrid forms, projecting the film through a broken glass plate, capturing it to an analog and a digital video camera, and running the results through her vidiffektor. Like many of Latimer’s films, the result has an ambiguous relationship with nostalgia: it is at once elegiac and restorative. Its images are plainly of the past, but their recapitulation through the bending forms of the vidiffektor make them present again. The Pool is dominated by two rhythmic turns: a continuous pulse, cast by the vidiffektor, and repeated dives that follow figures from the diving board to the “video-infested waters”. A yellow-brown patina further marks the image as antique, and yet these transformations are futurist in the sense that they could only belong to a forward-facing technology. The vidiffektor would return in The Magik Iffektor (2011), Latimer’s most overtly occult film in which scenes from a VHS copy of The Magic Sword (1962), featuring a sorceress, a belly dancer, and a strange assortment of mysterious figures, are processed through the vidiffektor. It is occult in tone but it is also a direct and unmysterious portrait of Latimer’s process, one which remains mystifying for the transformations wrought to the image: faces splinter with new colours breaking through them, and the swaying motions of a belly dancer correspond with the coursing, interwoven, vertical scanlines that seem to contain the figures, as if the scanlines alone are preventing the bleeding colours and soft lines of the figures from emanating out of the screen. The chaotic geometry woven into Latimer’s vidiffektor pieces is decidedly non-Euclidean in spirit, reminding of the splintering ropes in Mosaic. In 2013, Latimer would again revisit this hyperbolic geometry in a comic tribute to Norman McLaren, whose precise animation of Lines Vertical (1960) and Lines Horizontal (1962) are comically subverted into a tartan grid in Latimer’s Lines Postfixal (2013). The artist not only superimposes McLaren’s films, in a celebration of their meticulous interplay, but batters them through generation loss by way of Betamax and VHS decks until McLaren’s mannered lines fray, assuming the more familiar and intimate grit of home video.

Jane’s Birthday (Christine Lucy Latimer, 2013)

The durational aspect of Latimer’s work returns in two films made in 2013: Jane’s Birthday, a record of a road trip taken with Latimer’s sister Jane, and Nationtime, a transformative record of Canada Day Fireworks. In Jane’s Birthday, the continuous motion of a windshield wiper serves as an unheard metronome measuring out glimpses of a wet road seen in black and white digital video. In Latimer’s note on the piece, she contextualizes it as a trip to the beach, which gives the inclement atmosphere a kind of comedy: knowing their destination and seeing the weather filtered through this rhythmic conceit makes it something like the structural films that came before them, so often, impossible or doomed journeys across a room. Nationtime, taking its title from the album by Joe McPhee, suspends the momentary wonder of a bursting firework taken with a cell phone camera, in a circuit of VHS feedback and artifacting. The result is highly unnatural in that a shape is created around the bursting firework that imposes between the black of the night sky and the lens, a phantasmal trace of light formed by echo and feedback. 

Physics and Metaphysics in Modern Photography (Christine Lucy Latimer, 2014)

Tender (Christine Lucy Latimer, 2021)

Latimer would use a cellphone again in Physics and Metaphysics in Modern Photography (2014), in which gloved hands turn the pages of The 1957 Photographer’s Almanac, 1957 being a significant year in which moving image media further diverged from film and televisual practice with the generation of the first digital image. Latimer documents the colour advertisements that grace the almanac’s pages: in a self-conscious gesture of media translation, her footage has been transferred to colour 16mm film. Thus, Physics and Metaphysics in Modern Photography collapses a history of image processes into its hybrid constitution. The gloved hands, like the surgeon’s tools in Over {Past:Future} Sight, lend a clinical, bureaucratic tone to something that is ultimately erotic, a subtle copenetration of the ethereal signal and the fleshy film strip. Physics and Metaphysics in Modern Photography also marks a new direction in Latimer’s work towards a more active mediation of the paracinematic ruins on the sidelines of contemporary media art. In Still Feeling Blue About Colour Separation (2015), Latimer rephotographs internet-sourced images of MacBeth ColorChecker cards—cards that are used to gauge the accurate reproduction of colour in motion picture printing—to super 8 cyanotype emulsion, resulting in a blue-cast image, itself a complex process that involves coating the film stock in a custom emulsion fluid. As with many of her approaches, Latimer is engaging in something akin to breaking-the-machine, in other words, resisting the intended use of a tool or a material in order to push it in new and inevitably personal, idiosyncratic directions. With Still Feeling Blue, she does so while also acknowledging the long history of image-making tools, taking crowd-drawn images and making them intimate, like the tone forecast by its torch-song title. These histories, systems and tools are fragile, but like any social, communally engrained process, they are adaptable and resilient. This resilience is present also in Latimer’s work that deals with themes beyond the apparatus, for instance, her cameraless film Tender (2021), in which the holographic portions of Canadian dollar bills are printed directly onto the film strip, animating the imagery that the currency uses to indicate the colonial debts of the nation: the Peace Tower in Ottawa, the maple leaf, symbols that speak to a permitted self-definition. Its process is a strange variation on photographic counterfeiting: and yet it is also a non-transactable, disfigurative counterfeit, at once interrogating the physical makeup of currency and insisting on only imaginary values.

The resilience of media is at the heart of House Pieces (2019): Latimer recovers real estate photos of her mother’s former house that have been left to degrade on a poorly stored SD card over several years. Reconstructing these images from the light and dark components of the photos’s high-dynamic range, Latimer transfers them to VHS as a montage that reveals these rooms in a steady skip, the lines of doorframes and steps revealed in a spectral, faintly coloured light. Resilience is, perhaps, a strange theme to emerge from a body of work that has been so focused around digital scramble, generation loss, synthesis and other forms of visual obstruction, but Latimer’s processes tend towards the elastic translation of images into new forms. The images she works with may be consecrated through the eternal reproduction of cinephilia, like McLaren’s films or The Magic Sword; or they may be evanescent, like stray televisual signals, home movies, or the remains of fruit flies. It is rare that Latimer’s films should totally subsume their sources: instead their fearsome aesthetics mask a softer form of digestion. The work is disfigurative, but it is rarely destructive: on the contrary, it is restorative, widening the reach and longevity of its sources and its tools.