grid, glitch and always-on in warhol outer space

8/21/2019 Grid, Glitch and Always-On in Warhol Outer Space

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Graduate Fine Arts Dialogs and Practices

CCA Fall 2014

Professor Fortescue

2014-12-03

Benjamin De Kosnik

Glitch, Saturation, and Time in Outer and Inner Space

The year is 1965, the artist is Andy Warhol, the subject is Edie Sedgwick. The combination

of these three elements creates the hybrid film and video work Outer and Inner Space. This

artwork is an enigma, an opalescent beauty of stunning complexity that premiered at an

underground party on a long-abandoned subway station under the Waldorf-Astoria in

New York, and then was not shown in public for the next thirty years: an artwork that

continues to defy interpretation into the present day. Instead of talking directly about this

object, let us start the discussion by describing the artwork and the multiple medias that

are used to make it, and then talk around it, fly above it, approach on multiple vectors and

and tie it to trends in contemporary culture over the last fifty years.

Several aspects of this artwork are especially relevant in visual culture today, and merit

closer examination: saturated grid forms and information density, glitch and tonal

deterioration across two and three dimensions, hybrid art forms and new styles, dark

matter and the dynarchive in art archives, and always-on (aka You There?) normalization.


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Before the above is attempted, some working vocabulary needs to be generated in order

to pin down this elusive work and fully describe it.

Item 01. Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, frame 00019.

Description

Outer and Inner Space is an artwork by Andy Warhol created in 1965 that is a mix of

previous video recordings, 16mm film, and a live performance with off-screen

interactions. Total running times is 33 minutes. It is composed of two reels of black and

white 16 mm film, engineered to be displayed via two channel simultaneous projection

with a single audio track. It features Edie Sedgwick as the sole subject (Rush, 52).

Each channel is itself split in two sub-channels, featuring a live Edie Sedgwick on the right

side interacting with a previously video-recorded playback of herself on the left side of

the same channel's screen. None of the sub-channels are the same, but are often

mistaken as such by casual observers. When both channels are projected together, the


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result is a horizontal grid of four Edie Sedgwick images, a tetraptych of film and video, all

appearing to interact simultaneously.

Item 02. Benjamin De Kosnik, Frame 00019 multi-channel visualization

Item 03. Benjamin De Kosnik, Frame 00019 sub-channel visualization

There is off-screen direction and commentary from unknown persons. Although the

predominant photographic technique is a close-focus front or right portrait face, each

channel has a camera that is not fixed, moving slightly through the piece. The left channel

slowly zooms out from a close-crop front face to a seated torso cropped at the waist


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drinking from a cup, starting at minute twelve. The right channel starts with the torso crop

of Edie smoking a cigarette and then at minute three moves in to a tight face crop. On

each channel, when the camera pulls out enough to see bits of the surrounding factory

setup: a couch, bits of the projection screen for the video recording image, the white

t-shirt of an un-credited factory worker with his back to the screen adjusting the video

playback.

Audio is muffled and unclear, each of the four Edies in the horizontal grid talking in unison

with an unending drone of two film projectors omnipresent in the background.

Context

Within one week at the end of summer, 1965 sees the first two uses of video art in a public

performance or show. One is Andy Warhol, with Outer and Inner Space. The other is Nam

June Paik, with Electronic Video Recorder . The world around these two artists is shaking,

and the televised image plays a key part: the civil rights movement starts the year with the

Selma to Montgomery march, and the resulting televised violence catalyzes political

reform in bill form via the Voting Rights Act by the beginning of August. Revolution is in

the air.

Warhol retires from painting in April, to work on film, and talks to reporters of Hollywood

and making films (Watson, 72). He creates the situation whereby his previous work on


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tape recording and participation in publicity surrounding the launch of a new magazine

for recording enthusiasts enables the temporary loan of a Norelco slant scan video

recorder in June for the explicit use in the creation of his underground movies (Goldsmith,

69). Almost no footage of this early video recording exists in a view-able form today: the

stray bits in this artwork are the most accessible. The only other Warhol work that

incorporates video recording is Water from 1972. This is a video recording of an office

water cooler, with the accompanying audio track.

Warhol premiers Outer and Inner Space on September 29, 1965 at the Underground Party,

on the abandoned subway tracks beneath the Waldorf-Astoria. The party itself is

videotaped and played back to guests (Rush, 213).

Nam June Paik had been working on video recording since 1961, when he calculates that

it would cost $500k. The year before, he’s working in Japan with Shuya Abe to make a

similar device from a kit, believing that “as collage technic replaced oil-paint, CRT will

replace canvass (sic)”. According to Michael Rush's video art chronology, Nam June Paik

had been attempting to build a video tape recorder in Japan the previous year, and failed.

He returns to the United States, and secures a Rockafeller Foundation grant to purchase a

Sony Portapack, competing brand of video recorder that records in a currently-accessible

format. He first shows Electronic Video Recorder on October 4, 1965 at Cafe A Go Go: less

than a week after Warhol shows Outer and Inner Space at the Underground Party (ibid).

Between the two of them, this week sees the following firsts: first video artwork shown in

public, first hybrid video/film artwork show in public, first multi-channel video/film


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artwork, first live use of interactive, non-broadcast video recording and playback.

Arguably the first “rave.”

Warhol and Paik stand together at the beginning of the commodity video recording age.

Warhol bets on cultural trends that rise in prominence dramatically over the next fifty

years: celebrity, and the particular sub-genre of beautiful-rich-tragic, mix-remix fluidity,

the hyper personal via a monotonously recorded self. It is a strange coincidence that the

day before Edie Sedgwick died, she was visiting the set of An American Family , the first

reality television show (Painter and Weismann, 189). In retrospect, her screen tests,

Warhol movies, energized mugging for publicity leapfrog the form of unscripted television

and put her directly into a conversation with today's single-person, self-produced,

non-broadcast social media forms like self-promotional Facebook postings and

too-intimate video blogging.

Paik gets the long term form for video art correct from the onset. Not only does he use the

winning video format in the Sony Portapack, but his 1973 essay Video Common Market

accurately predicts the balkanized video distribution of today: a combination of dark

archives traded on bittorrent, free-for-all youtube pirate distribution, UbuWeb, Ikono tv,

public-sponsored work for traditional broadcasters like Arte and BBC 4 in Europe,

supplemented by the streaming back-catalog of Netflix and Hulu (Hanhardt, 182).

Grid Saturation


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The first approach vector for perceiving Outer and Inner Space is a visual characteristic of

the artwork: the grid form.

Grids are for saturation, information overflow. Deploying the grid can be thought of as

either throwing a life-preserver to the beleaguered observer, or deliberately

overwhelming the beleaguered observer with so much data that any one instance loses

meaning, creating instead a super-saturated meta-image with collective meaning out of

the smaller components.

Item 04. Harry Shunk Archive, Photos of Lleana Sonnabend Gallery Installation, 1965

The easiest grid is a small one, in two dimensions. For the purposes of this discussion, a

grid is defined to be adjacent cells that repeat in a contiguous manner. Translated

directly, the two-channel projection of Outer and Inner Space, is a one by four grid where

each sub-channel is a grid cell.


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Item 05. Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1965. As installed in Gagosian Gallery, NY, 2009.

Warhol uses grids in many two-dimensional artworks. The Flowers series and multiples

that he was working on in 1965 with his collaborators are shown above. This composition

is pure grid, without any human portraiture.

It is interesting to note the de-saturation of the Flowers artworks, as they are installed for

the Paris show at Lleana Sonnabend Gallery in 1965, and then at the Gagosian in New York

forty four years later. In this time span, the contemporary media visual field becomes

increasingly saturated, and the display of fine art becomes much less frenetic. The white

space double, quadruples, is squared again.


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Item 06. Andy Warhol, Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963.

Item 07. Para/Flex 6 Monitor Mount - Front, 2014.

Warhol deploys the grid in the commissioned portrait of Ethel Scull to impressive results

that thrilled the subject. Talking thirty years later, long after the painting is acknowledged

as a classic and in the shared ownership of two of New York’s finest art institutions, Ethel

Scull finds the grid form, originating from multiple photo-booth photos and then

silk-screened into a variable composition that she could “re-arrange if bored” a telling

portrait, a living document that captures her in a more precise way that conventional

portraiture (Shanes, 82).


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The multiple perspectives of a single human subject, used in Ethel Scull 36 Times, is similar

to multiple ways of looking at pure data objects in a virtual space. The explosion of data

has normalized multiple monitor, information-rich displays for many workers in medical,

scientific, and engineering fields. These multi-channel displays were then appropriated

for other tasks, used as a general tool for information multiplication, showing multiple

view-points and compressing three dimensional space into a two-dimensional grid. A

productivity aid, or as display-enforced multi-tasking.

Item 08. Andy Warhol, Edie Segwick , Photobooth Portrait, 1965.


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Item 09. Andy Warhol, Holly Solomon, Photobooth Portrait, 1965.

Item 10. Zenview Quad 22, 2014.

Other examples that demonstrate Warhol’s grid obsession, examples beyond painting,

past artworks composed of silkscreen multiples: photo-booth photography. The two


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examples above are from 1965, and show the base level of Warhol thinking about the

composition of portraits to be grid-like at the very inception.

Item 11. Andy Warhol, Screen Test , 1965.

Item 12. Matt York, US Customs and Border Patrol Agents fly a drone from a trailer , 2014.

And the same with 16mm film works. His early examples of Edie Sedgwick in 16mm film

are from his Screentests, which are three-minute, single-channel, black and white film


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“portraits” of people who wander into his studio, The Factory. Over the next couple of

months, he shoots at least three Screentests of Edie, as witnessed by the MoMA Screentest

inventory (MoMA, 1). Screentests can be thought of as Warhol’s initial experimentation in

single channel portraiture in time, a photo-booth plus time format

In the same way that Warhol thinks about the single-channel moving image and

portraiture in Screentests, Outer and Inner Space is especially interesting as the first

example of time-based media from Warhol that uses multiple channels. This is the first

use of two channel projection by Warhol, and a the first deployment of a visual grid of four

competing sub-channels arranged in a horizontal row, and the only use of both video and

film.

The use of the grid, with the interplay of film and video, adds intrigue to the presented

portrait. There is no defined visual narrative, just multiplication of the subject, not the

merest wisp of story, just spectacle. It can be essentialized as thirty minutes of portraiture

stuck in a grid. All video tracks present in Outer and Inner Space could be de-composited

to single-channel track, but Warhol composites this to double, and then quadruple, the

information being presented. It’s four times more efficient.

A real question exists about looping, and the relationship between the pre-recorded video

sub-channel, and the live sub-channel. Do any of the pre-recorded sub-channels repeat or

loop? Each sub-channel seems sometime only imperceptibly different from the others,

leading one to think that this is not surveillance, but consensual voyeurism between

director and observer typical of film. In the earlier piece Sleep, Warhol loops a smaller


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duration piece into an intolerably long work (Goldsmith, 74). It is difficult to be certain by

visual inspection alone. Preliminary analysis with the aid of computer forensics to pull

apart the channels, and then compare sub-channels is as of yet inconclusive.

The audio is mixed on top of itself, all the subjects are only occasionally audible in a

distinct manner. With no distinct voice, instead an overlapping murmuring, the observer

is left with the impression of watching from across the room. Only the presence of Edie

Sedgwick is visible, but nothing specific.

The same tetraptch form is used in later Warhol film works from this period, ie Chelsea

Girls. Yet in the later film the audio information from the actors is captured in a less

amateur manner, separated out into discrete sub-channel components, and then mixed

into one synchronized audio track plays a coherent soundtrack that moves between the

various frames.

The visual field is different in Chelsea Girls as well: the same four-cell horizontal grid, the

same two channel projection with four sub-channels total. In Chelsea Girls all four tracks

are of different people. Nico appears mostly in track two, if one orders the two visual

channels into four tracks, proceeding from left to right starting with one. In Chelsea Girls,

the audio is phased such that the first channel will have hot audio, and the second

channel is cold with no sound, and then sometimes the audio reverses, and it is just the

left channel that has projection. The end result is that the later film does have a narrative

structure, and over-lapping stories that form a coherent portrait of the building itself.


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Item 13. The New Multi-Screen World Infographic, 2012

Contemporary mass visual culture, especially video, has normalized the deployment of

the grid to represent complex information. Fifty years ago, Warhol obscures the personal

on four screens of output, amplifying nothing but deflecting all: "Warhol views media

technologies as shields, not prostheses." Foster(31-32). Using the reading that Edie

Sedgwick is Andy Warhol's creative doppelganger, this evasive but alluring portrait holds

the possibility that what is being captured on screen is a true sense of what Warhol would

want for his own self-depiction.


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Glitch and Tonal Variance Across Forms

A second approach vector for examining Outer and Inner Space is another visual

characteristic: gitch. Glitch is tonal variance between individual cells in a grid.

In Ten Lizes, Warhol repeats the same source image ten times in the work, but variance in

production due to the amount of ink, the pressure applied by the printmaker, and

application technique used to move the ink through the screen form ten distinct images of

Elizabeth Taylor. Warhol was not interested in editioning ten note-perfect copies. It’s the

difference between them that makes this artwork.

Item 14. Andy Warhol, Ten Lizes, 1963

This is deliberate: the painterly deterioration of black and white faces is considered

“better” than the perfect copy. And the tear of ink, a two-dimensional glitch, gets

repeated as the video glitch in the video recording medium. This is a deliberate visual

form. A by-product of Warhol’s interest in associates with a “certain amount of

misunderstanding,” where a “minor misunderstanding here and there” or when the “tape


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is bad” or “when they didn’t quite hear what you told them to do” creates a better work

(Warhol, Philosophy, 99).

Item 15. Andy Warhol, Cagney , 1962

Item 16. Andy Warhol, The Kiss (Bela Lugosi), 1963

Instead of flowers, of pictures of celebrities like Cagney, or Elizabeth Taylor, the subject

that varies in Outer and Inner Space is Edie Sedgewick, repeated not-quite-the-same way

four times total. This is another style of the same tonal variance that is found within

Warhol’s Cagney , as above.


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Perhaps there are multiple reasons supporting Warhol’s glitch aesthetic. Glitch is the

artist pointing at the medium. A layer of glitch is added to the repeating video forms,

making them more ephemeral, to get further away from the idea of a perfect portrait. And

at the same time, to make the medium visible, to inject it into the visual field. Perhaps it

started in two dimensions, on silk-screened works, done to prove he’s a painter, that this

is paint, applied with a brush. To show the hand in an otherwise mechanical act of

reproduction, and to tweak the nose of the art-market purists that opposed The Factory’s

production techniques and engaged stance with respect to art market commercialization.

An interesting aspect of Outer and Inner Space is that both film and video styles are used in

the production of this time-based composition, without any editing. Warhol composed

in-camera, implying all video effects are live. That said, some minor film effects such as

enlarged 16mm film audio dots over-printed on the film were added in post-production or

as part of developing the film.

Item 17. Andy Warhol, Film Glitch Examples from Outer and Inner Space, 1965

Film styles deployed in Outer and Inner Space include:film jog and stutter, visual flourishes

at the end based on enlarged 16mm optical sound dots, and the framing of the two

channel projection, with some start-up time at the beginning, and then a fade to pure

white and then black at the end.


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Item 18. Andy Warhol, Video Distortion Glitch Examples from Outer and Inner Space, 1965

Item 19. Andy Warhol, Video Pause and Roll Glitch Examples from Outer and Inner Space, 1965

Video styles deployed include: vertical rolls, video distortion, most probably a result of

some kind of magnetic disturbance, cross fading, the use of the pause or video frame

freeze, and the face to a single point caused by power cycle of a CRT television set.

The fade to point is especially compelling. The artwork ends with this, the television part

being explicitly turned off in one channel, and then later the second channel's video

recording ends, due to the different run times of the 16mm film reels and the video

recording tape length of thirty minutes.


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Item 20. Andy Warhol, Video CRT Death Glitch Examples from Outer and Inner Space, 1965

Both channels feature CRT TV-set deaths, only now obvious as a video flourish in the age

of television sets made of LED or plasma, display hardware that doesn’t die by converging

to a single point of white. Warhol sees this at the inception of the video recording medium,

with the proliferation of CRT television sets, but the contemporary era stands on the other

side of this historical moment, where CRT displays and incandescent lighting are on the

low ebb, eclipsed by the age of light emitting diodes.

Another kind of visual artifacting present in Outer and Inner Space is the mixture of both

16m film and video recording and playback mediums. These are called hybrid styles.

An example of a hybrid style is the frame rate strobe effect. The different frame rates

between the 16mm film and horizontal scan lines of the Norelco video recording create a

subtle strobe effect in the video image, but only becoming noticeable when the source

jumps media again, and is transformed into a digital file. When the original source is

permuted again by the move into digital bootlegs, a third frame rate emerges, capturing

the variance between film and video sources. In addition, these bootlegs bring in


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contemporary video aesthetics, like slow pan-and-scan in-camera movement by the

hand-cam video operator, versus steady-cam mounts.

Viewing via bootleg incorporates its very own, strange glitch. One source has a steady

camera recording the two reel projection, but the audio quality is severely compromised

by the postion of the recorder in-between the two clanking 16mm projectors. The other

source is an un-steady hand-held camera that pans between the two channels, but is

often only focused on the rightmost channel, cutting off the left channel part-way. This

source has much clearer audio, and higher-resolution video. So the viewer is left to shuffle

between the two sources, comparing each to perceive what was intended.

Warhol’s previous history of tonal variance, fuse with the explicit pointing at film, video,

and the mixed mediums and hybrid forms in Outer and Inner Space. Perhaps this,

multiplied with yet another Warhol obsession in the form of celebrity culture, is Warhol

saying with a visual form that to be a superstar, one must be represent-able in multiple

mediums at the same time. That imperfection and glitch will happen via intentional or

transmitted error and should be fully embraced. Photo, video, media, celebrity, art film,

art short-form, press-release, rumor, glitch and leak to art film long-form? Superstars

encompass multiple of these media, often at the same time.

Failure of Canonical Archives vs. Triumph of Fan Archives


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Another aspect of contemporary visual culture that has particular relevance for Outer and

Inner Space is the archival turn. Approach vector three: access versus preservation of this

artwork through the last fifty years, the complications surrounding contemporary

attempts to access this work, and musing on the future of video art as an art form when a

canonical text is obscured.

The video recordings that use in Outer and Inner Space are from a Norelco video recorder,

the master video tapes used are now considered obsolete and not retrievable from

whatever media remains from 1965, no matter how carefully preserved the existent

physical tapes are preserved in the museum’s vault. The two 16mm film reels that

contained Outer and Inner Space were restored by the Whitney in 1996, and had not been

screened for “30 years” before that (Angeli, 1).

Item 21. Studio Fan Remix Work In Progress, 2014

In theorizing about Outer and Inner Space, a conflict arises between the preservation of

the Warhol film and video information via the canonical archive, the ongoing preservation


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project of the Whitney and MoMA, and public access to cultural history. Physical media is

fragile, broadcast television archives are either non-existent or haphazard, film archives

molder, technology dies, all secrets are eventually lost. How is electronic media best

preserved for future generations to view, and how can contemporary artists access and

incorporate these media texts, or learn about the production techniques that molded

their creation?

This film and all rights relating to it are property of the Warhol Foundation. The New York

MoMA also has a copy. The MoMA has a rental policy for Warhol 16mm film, and one can

actually pay a nominal fee for the rental of the 16mm film reels, the shipping from NY to

SF, the the multi-screen projection at the destination. These two reels are the canonical

form for this artwork at the moment, the resorted prints first shown in 1996. The current

month also has the Warhol Foundation, the MoMA, and a third party restoration company

working on a new restoration and digitization effort, the fruits of which have not been

publicly screened.

Since this work has been so difficult to see, there is a special lure to this piece. As such, it’s

been pirated and bootlegged at least twice: a 2008-era standard-definition recording of

32:33 minutes on DVD with mono sound, and a 2001-era steady camera ecording of 33:01

minutes transferred from VHS to DVDwith stereo sound, buried in the “Anonymous 23“

folder at the Media Research Center in the University of California, Berkeley library. Parts

of these two sources have been uploaded to the internet, and can be seen on YouTube.


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The existence of these bootlegs, outside of the canonical archive, qualifies Outer and Inner

Space as dark matter, defined by Gregory Sholette as “informal, unofficial,

non-institutional, self-organized practices made and circulated in the shadows of the

formal art world.” (Sholette, 1). Indeed, Outer and Inner Space has forced the archive into

the archival turn, from being a place of the dead, “much like a cemetery” to something

more dynamic: the “dynarchive" (De Kosnik, Chapter 3).

The barriers to seeing a canonical work of US video art are surprising, given its prominent

place in the history of video art and the contemporary interest in digital video art forms.

Given the stylistic invention, historical importance, and artistic stature of the material is

troubling. In reviewing the archive of criticism about Warhol films, a striking feature

becomes apparent: even veteran Warhol film critics have at most seen a small subset of

his total film and video output.

The Always-On and YT (You There?) Normalization

The last characteristic of Outer and Inner Space to be analyzed is an approach vector of

the timeless versus non-time in the artwork itself. As this artwork travels through time,

from the point of origination in 1965 until yesterday and now today: how is this work a

mirror for the time pressures of contemporary life? How is film time different from

television time, different from the asynchronous and non-linear time-limes characteristic

of contemporary life?


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Perhaps this is the correct moment to think of time in visual objects as part of an

expanded field. First, there is an object. Then, an object viewed in a linear time-line. Then,

multiple objects viewed in linear time. Then, multiple objects viewed in non-linear time.

In 1965, there was time, and multi-channel time taking each discrete point and making it

into a time-line, a portrait of change over distance. The continued evolution of the US

mediascape, the changes in technological capability, the new mediums provided by

non-scripted television series, aka “reality television,” to the multi-channel new universe

with scroll-text overlays in the 1990s, to the post-network era of serialized content, with

the rise of first the internet forms of email, then web, the addition of private web social

networks, and now the proliferation of social media, and multi-media forms of

blog-tumblr-twitter. Overlaying it all may be machine chatter, algorithms storing personal

data as per the “quantified self” movement, or the most current attempt to brand smart

devices and inter-connected computers as consumer devices ever more deeply

embedded into the fabric of living, aka “the internet of things.” This last time is

characteristic of multiple objects in non-linear or asynchronous time.

Back to specific instances of time in the visual field.

Starting with film time, ie an object viewed in linear time. Warhol sets up a film camera,

starts it rolling and walks away. Too long, many of these films. With too little happening.

“Set the camera” was Warhol’s big value-add to the film and video productions. Andy

Warhol desired “Just letting the characters come out.” (Bailey on Warhol, 24:44). There is


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often no or little plot, no professional sound production, often the camera is out-of-focus

and the sound is not legible. In Bailey on Warhol, Andy Warhol’s collaborator Paul

Morrissey says that the goal was to "make film as badly as possible," where they "look for

stars, and let them do what they want." This is anti-professional production, closely akin

today's amateur aesthetic.

And then television time, multiple objects viewed in linear time, creating space for a

"television temporality" as defined by Graig Uhlin, artworks that incorporate "extended

duration, liveness, and dead time." Notably, this is something that comes with serial

television, and the multiplication of time allowed by a form that has twenty four episodes

a year of a half-hour network show.

Lastly, non-linear and asynchronous depictions of time. In fact, the time depicted in Outer

and Inner Space most closely resembles the hyper recording of contemporary on-line

culture. Warhol was way ahead of the curve with respect to integrating recording devices

into his work and private life: 16mm film, Norelco video tape, personal tape recorders.

This kind of incessant recording, is a sympathetic form to contemporary social media

archiving, information overflow and visual/photographic saturation. It’s always-on,

pinging “yt” and asking “you there?”

In particular, Outer and Inner Space depicts and inner quantity that could be called private

space. It has to do with the tension between always-on recording, and the semblance of a

public self. With Warhol’s obsession with recording metastasizing from audio recording

his diary to three minute film loops of visitors to his studio, to arranging film and video to


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create composite images in time. This is depicting time as another layer of saturation, the

live talking to the recording anticipating the internet of memories and way the mass

archival of ephemera collapses time in our contemporary visual field. The always-on, the

constant recording, the preening for media and posing in public was something else in

1965, but perhaps de rigeur in 2014 with the quantified self movement, an evolution of the

notion of always-recording with the idea of analytics (applied algorithms) that build over

time?

With all the new channels, new forms. Something old inevitably gets dropped, fails to

make the leap into the new form. With Outer and Inner Space, it’s the audio. Hard to

understand for any sustained length of time, but has flashes of comprehensibility. With

contemporary life, it could be that with some prior communication channel, assumed by

default is in reality dropped or weakened. Talking on phones, or email, or letter writing:

gone.

With multiple channels, non-linear time-frames, what is the vanishing point of the

personal? Where is the point where private space begins, where perspective starts? Where

is the time for private thought, reflection? Neither outer, nor inner, but private. Where is

the private space in contemporary culture? How is that different than what’s implied by

the title’s inner space?


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Fade to Black

And now, what to make of this work, after looking at it so closely, traversing it on four

different approach vectors? This work remains elusive, but aspects of it deeply reflect our

contemporary visual field.

Dealing with the formal complexity of this piece is daunting.

Grids are only more relevant today, ascendant in the contemporary visual field, appearing

in more physical forms and within more media as an organizing container for complex

content. Grids represent complexity. As information becomes more dense, more grids will

appear, multiply, and a leap into three dimensions.

Similarly, in an age of transition between television watching, glitch is ever-present.

Transcoding film to DVD, and then DVD to digital files: each time content changes form is

an opportunity for deterioration and wear, the chance to introduce a glitch. With more

devices, more screens, and a vast ramp-up in variety of resolutions supported in everyday

viewing, differences and mistakes in translation will happen. Each context switch could

introduce an error. Multi-channel saturation replaces single-channel fidelity.

With the archival turn in contemporary art practice, artists must consider accessibility

when making media art. Given the difficulties present, attempts to fashion new art out of

Outer and Inner Space must be labeled fan art, persistently generative.


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And finally, Warhol’s most prescient victory in Outer and Inner Space is to incorporate

multiple time streams, with the new “live” stream commenting on the older, archived

version. This form anticipates the contemporary media of social media databases of

memories, a non-linear, explicitly multi-channel mediascape.

--

Word count: 5172


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De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Memory . Cambridge, Mass.: Forthcoming, MIT Press, 2015.

Dorment, Richard. "How Andy Warhol's Red Self-Portraits Were Made." The New YorkReview of Books, August 18, 2011.

Ekstract, Richard, and Richard Dorment. "Warhol Under the Waldorf." The New York

Review of Books, August 18, 2011.

Feldman, Frayda, and Jorg Schellmann. Andy Warhol: Prints : A Catalogue Raisonné1962-1987 . Fourth ed. Munich: Ed. Schellmann; 2003.

Foster, Hal. "Test Subjects." October 132, no. Spring (2010): 30-42.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews : 1962-1987 .New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004.

Hanhardt, John G., and Ken Hakuta. Nam June Paik: Global Visionary . London: Giles, 2013.

MoMA Circulating Film and Video Library, Andy Warhol Screen Tests Reels 1-28 Inventory.https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/Andy_Warhol_Screen_Tests-inventory.pdf, (accessed 2014-12-03)

Painter, Melissa, and David Weisman. Edie: Girl on Fire. San Francisco: Chronicle Books,2006.

Rush, Michael. Video Art . London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

Shanes, Eric. Warhol: The Masterworks. New York: Portland House, 1991.

Sholette, Gregory. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. New York:Pluto Press, 2011.

Uhlin, Graig. TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol. Cinema Journal, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Spring2010), pp. 1-23

Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Warhol, Andy, and Pat Hackett. POPism: The Warhol '60s. First Harvest Edition ed. NY:Hardcourt, 1990.


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Warhol, Andy, and Pat Hackett. The Andy Warhol Diaries. New York, NY: Warner Books,1989.

Watson, Steven. Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.


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Art Works and Figures Itemized

All works not otherwise attributed are the author's own work. All references to framenumbers assume “as if” counted from beginning of source, using 30 frames per second.

Item. 01.Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, 1965. Shown is frame 0019 from KG source. Via TheAndy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

Item. 02.Item 1 plus two channel visualization

Item. 03.Item 1 plus four sub-channel visualization

Item. 04.Harry Shunk Archive: Shunk-Kender Photography Collection, 1958-1973, Roy LichtensteinFoundation. Photos of Andy Warhol's Paris trip, 1965. Fromhttp://www.rlfphotoarchives.org/HSarchive.html

Item. 05.Andy Warhol, Flowers, Lleana Sonnabend Gallery, Paris, 1965. From Gagosian Gallery,http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/january-20-2009--warhol-from-the-sonnabend-collection

Item.06.

Andy Warhol, Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963. Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 80 x 144 inches.From both the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art,http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/490127

Item. 07.

Para/Flex 6 Monitor Mount - Front . From Humanscale Para/Flex Product Photos,http://www.humanscale.com/products/product_detail.cfm?group=Para/Flex

Item. 08.

Andy Warhol, Edie Segwick , 1965. Gelatin silver print. From The Andy Warhol Museum,

Pittsburgh,http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/warhol/photo_booth_portraits.html

Item. 09.Andy Warhol, Holly Solomon, 1965. Gelatin silver print. From MoMA,http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=52411

Item. 10.

Zenview Quad 22. From Digital Tigers Product Photos,http://www.digitaltigers.com/zenview-quad22.asp

Item. 11.


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Andy Warhol, Screen Test , 1965. 16mm film, 3 minutes. Shown is split-frame of one EdieSedgwick screen test. From The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

Item. 12.

Matt York, US Customs and Border Patrol agents fly a drone from a trailer , 2014. From The

Associated Press Via The Guardian,Half of US-Mexico border now patrolled only by drone, 2014-11-13,http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/13/half-us-mexico-border-patrolled-drone

Item. 13.

The New Multi-Screen World Infographic, 2012. From Think With Google,https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/infographics/multi-screen-world-infographic.html

Item. 14.Andy Warhol, Ten Lizes, 1963. Screenprint, 201 x 564.5 cm. From the Pompidou, France.

https://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/ressource.action?param.idSource=FR_O-d67b25ecfcd159c37af8d126b999524a&param.id=FR_R-865e20b3b749193062ade78b41b319d6&param.refStatus=nsr

Item. 15.

Andy Warhol, Cagney , 1962. Screenprint, 30 x 40 inches. From MoMA, NY.http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=84127

Item. 16.

Andy Warhol, The Kiss (Bela Lugosi), 1963. Screenprint, 30 x 40 inches. From AIC, Chicago,IL and MoMA, NY. From AIC, http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/69013

Item. 17.Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, 1965. Various film glitch examples from KG source,shown left to right : frame 57895 with dots, frame 58111 with screen frames and dots,frame 581444 with screen frame and jog, frame 5822 with blank dual screen projection.Via The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

Item. 18.

Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, 1965. Various video glitch examples of distortionfrom UCB/MRC source, shown left to right : frame 19667 with static and horizontal bars,

frame 19709 with same, frame 00082 with sub-channel a distortion, frame 00025 withsame. Via The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

Item. 19.Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, 1965. Various video glitch examples of pause androlls from UCB/MRC source, shown left to right : frame 42509 with pause, frame 42549 withsame, frame 22529 with sub-channel d roll, frame 22528 with same. Via The Andy WarholMuseum, Pittsburgh, PA

Item. 20.

Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, 1965. Various video glitch examples of CRT deathfrom UCB/MRC source, shown left to right : frame 58792 and frame 58815. Via The AndyWarhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA


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Item. 21.Development of in-progress 3-channel Work in SF Studio , 2014.


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Bibliography (moving images)

Bailey, David. Documentary on Warhol. Associated Television, UK, 1973.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JwFKukEUiY, (accessed 2014-11-13)

Painters Painting. Australian Film Institute [distributor], 1972. DVD.

Warhol, Andy. Beauty No. 2. USA, 1965. 16mm film transferred to avi digital mediacontainer. Karagarga Bittorrent Dark Matter Archive, (accessed 2014-10-25)

Warhol, Andy and Paul Morrissey. Chelsea Girls. USA, 1966. DVD.

Warhol, Andy. Outer and Inner Space. USA, 1965.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i9TBIYW_5E, (accessed 2014-11-13)

Warhol, Andy. Outer and Inner Space. USA, 1965. VHS handcam transferred to DVD.Media Research Library, University of California Berkeley, (accessed 2014-10-25)

Warhol, Andy. Outer and Inner Space. USA, 1965. Videocam steadycam transferred to DVDtransferred to avi digital media container. Karagarga Bittorrent Dark Matter Archive,(accessed 2014-10-25)

Warhol, Andy. Screen Tests. USA, 1964. DVD.

grid, glitch and always-on in warhol outer space

Documents