Shutter Interface
Shutter Interface
by Paul Sharits
Paul Sharits’ Shutter Interface is a multi screen installation born of an intent to reveal the material substance of cinema in its purest form: spatially. It breaks down film into a series of machinegun bursts of chromatic relationships in a visually overwhelming montage that was intended as “a 3D metaphor of the space of the brain in an epileptic state, brought under control and harmonized.”
ReadInitially trained as a painter, Sharits (who died in 1993) became intrigued by discontinuities between seeing and hearing, between reading and listening. He realized that (for him), film, and sound film, appeared to be the most natural medium for testing these thresholds of relatedness between perception. And so his filmmaking is marked by an interest in speech patterns, music and the temporal pulses of nature, which seem to imspire him much more directly than anything visual. In particular, his flicker films (like Shutter Interface), in which bursts of differently coloured single frames of solid seem to either blend, or to furiously vibrate – are filled with attempts to allow vision to function in a way analogous to hearing. They are, and this is, staggering