RP31

An indispensable enabler of Hollywood and the television industry, the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (SMPTE) has the motto “We Set the Standard for Motion Imaging.” The organization, which was set up almost a hundred years ago, develops standards for image and sound technologies used in the presentation of the moving image in cinemas and televisual media throughout the world. These standards include charts used to check the quality of film projection, as well as testing for focus, aperture, field steadiness, and framing. Lucy Raven’s "RP31" (where “RP” stands for “recommended practices”) is an animation composed from 31 test patterns and calibration charts. These charts span a period of seventy years, and have been accumulated by Raven via connections to film studios, archives, and projectionists in Los Angeles and throughout the US. As a collection of material it maps an archive of obsolescent technologies, as one form of projection apparatus overtakes another. Although the globalization of cinema produced in the US was enabled by these standards, intended to make moving images appear uniform wherever they are shown, they document changing approaches toward both regulation and perception. Rather than presenting the test patterns in their intended static singularity, "RP31" splices together single frames from each of the 31 reels, creating an intense optical experience. A compression of time is not only experienced sensorially but takes place on an epistemic level, with the patterns and charts functioning as historically contingent signs. The work is rooted in a formal history of experimental film, but also in the notion that a critique of mainstream cinema is present in the materiality of cinema itself—perhaps most clearly in the stresses and constraints of its own mass circulation. Raven’s research addresses cinema at the level of its material conditions, and in so doing offers an index of the volatile social and economic relations upon which the industry rests. Her illustrated lecture On Location traces Hollywood’s export of raw materials—here taking the form of images—to countries in South-East Asia to be processed, reformed, and recombined. Beginning with the recent conversion of Roland Emmerich’s 2009 disaster-apocalypse film 2012 from 2D to 3D, Raven investigates the developing technologies and infrastructures through which landscapes, locations, and stereoscopic 3D spaces are constructed. In postproduction studios in India and China, frame-by-frame image manipulation and the adaptation of films for new audiences have brought about a burgeoning expansion of the cinema industry that also potentially signals the end of “Hollywood” as the home of mainstream film production. In parallel with the formal character of "RP31", the lecture On location functions as a mode of discursive forensics, making palpable the material modulations between the abstracting demands of technological standardization and the complexities of cinema as social imaginary.