Immobilité iPhone App Back Online!

The Immobilité iPhone app has been disabled for a few months but is now back online here. It's free.

The iPhone app remix is different than the other versions that have been exhibited around the world in that it focuses on using still images and subtitles, as well as an original remix of the 75 minute soundtrack, to redistribute the cinematic flow of the work so that it coincides with your own rhythm, your own touch. In this way, I think of it as a mash-up of Chris Marker's Le Jette style with early iPhone app potential.

I discuss Marker's influence in the making of Immobilité, as well as others like Antonioni, Varda, Bergman, and Godard, at the Rhizome interview here. An excerpt from that interview reads:

Besides, I am especially attracted to some of the more experimental, visionary artworks composed by artists like Chris Marker and Agnes Varda as well as the work of Antonioni, Bergman, Cassavetes, Fellini, Godard, and Kar-Wai. There is something about the way that these other artists oscillate between interior and exterior landscapes that really speaks to me. I have also seen multi-media exhibitions by both Godard and Varda and have navigated through CD-ROMS by Marker, so it's not that odd to go in the other direction, i.e. from novel writing and net art and VJ performance into feature-length filmmaking-as-art. Although it should be said that my idea was not to make a film per se, but to literally remix the form of a feature-length foreign film so that it felt like something you would see in an art-house theater but that was clearly not a major motion picture and would be best experienced as a museum installation. To achieve this, I went very D-I-Y, and shot the work entirely on mobile phone and essentially mashed-up a more amateurish visual aesthetic with my over-the-top auteur-ish methods. For example, there are many of these "painterly" scenes that point back to the abstract expressionist roots of the art scene that has come out of the Cornwall region of the UK where the work was shot. These painterly images were made not in After-Effects, in fact there are no slick, Jeremy Blake-like composites in the work, but rather flickering color fields and character portraits created using experimental hand-held techniques, something that you can really play with once you get a feel for the mobile phone as capturing device. As odd as it may sound, I imagined the mobile phone as part image capturing device, part paintbrush, and part communications gadget during the entire production.

More updates soon ...

Keywords: Mark Amerika, Immobilité, iPhone app, Chris Marker