Lost
Zoe Beloff
Stereoscopic performance, toy hand-cranked projector, 78 rpm phonograph, 3-D slides
USA 1995
Beloff’s stereoscopic performance Lost (1995) involves a toy hand-cranked projector from the 1940s, a 78 rpm phonograph and 3-D slides showing old, defunct store windows from New York’s Lower East Side, which are all gone now. During the performance Beloff projected ghostly figures of 16mm films from a bygone era into the slides of the store windows with her hand-cranked projector. For example, she projected a 16mm film called Art Studies on to 3-D slides of a decaying mannequin with a crumbling corset in an underwear shop. Other 16mm films she used included home movies from the 1930s of nude women. For the sound track she worked with a wind-up 78 rpm phonograph, playing records such as “Cohen on the Telephone,” which was a hugely popular Jewish vaudeville sketch during the1920s. The film is struggling through the projector, the records are skipping on the turntable as Beloff projects forward and backward on her hand-cranked projector. One sees the apparatuses, they are in the space of the audience and not locked away in the projection booth. (Ju.Ju.Li.)
“I started to think about how an audience a hundred years ago experienced movies very differently than we do today. […] I began to realize that the apparatus is always a part of the storytelling process – part of the experience of understanding media – whether people are aware of it or not. I had the idea that, to conjure up the past, it was not enough just to work with historical imagery or archival footage; one must think also about projection apparatuses of an earlier era. […] I wanted to foreground the nineteenth century idea that machines of mechanical reproduction are really ‘time machines’: cinema – a time machine of movement – frame by frame awakening forgotten fantasies, stereo photography bringing about the artificial reconstruction of space, and the phonograph resurrecting the voices of the dead” (Zoe Beloff in Parikka: 2011).
Zoe Beloff, born 1958 in Edinburgh, Scotland, lives and works in New York.
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References
Karen Beckman, “Impossible Spaces and Philosophical Toys: An Interview with Zoe Beloff,” Grey Room, no. 22 (Winter 2005), pp. 68–85.
Heather Hendershot, “Of Ghosts and Machines: An Interview with Zoe Beloff,” Cinema Journal, vol. 45, no. 3 (Spring 2006), pp. 130–140.
Jussi Parikka, “‘With Each Project I Find Myself Reimagining What Cinema Might Be’”: An Interview with Zoe Beloff (2011), http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/imagenarrative/numerous.
See also
