Plateau, Duchamp and the Machine Célibataire
Presentation by Edwin Carels as part of the Evening of ... Joost Rekveld.
The ambition to make viewing an experience of 'intimate presence' (the Japanese translation of Virtual Reality) occupied both artists and scientists long before the history of film actually began. The manipulation of the most elemental components of perception, on one hand, and some culturally biased cognitive patterns on the other, can lead to an artificial, but at the same time very corpo-real experience. This is demonstrated in the physiological research preceding cinematography by an inventor like Joseph Plateau, as well as in the work of an avant-garde artist like Marcel Duchamp. Maybe cinema's purest ambition has always been to function as a 'machine célibataire'.
