PXL THIS 13

PXL THIS by Gerry Fialka, 310-306-7330 pfsuzy@aol.com 2006

www.indiespace.com/pxlthis

Gerry Fialka started the PXL THIS film festival in 1991 to celebrate moving image art made with the PXL 2000 Fisher Price toy video camera. The annual fest provides a forum for the community to share the viewing experience. It operates on an all-volunteer basis, using as little as 5 dollars per year for minor expenses like postage. This reflects the fact that many Pixelators can make art with very little money. PXL THIS has created, as Grace Lee Boggs says, "a movement of connectedness rather than consumerism, of Being rather than of Having." Film as an art form has been swindled by capitalism, and as Craig Baldwin proclaims, "It is our job to reswindle it back." PXL's affordability democratizes movie-making.

Pixelvision evokes Thelonius Monk's method of hearing the overtones, yet leaving them out of the final composition. Since the viewer is seeing less visual information, they are more involved, causing transformative participation by filling in what is missing. As well, Pixelators embrace the technical limitations to their advantage in the creative process. It is possible to utilize a weakness and incorporate it into a strength. John Cassavetes's strength drew from his weakness - he embraced all that actors did, especially if they did it wrong, by accident or in defiance of his own plan. "Carefully make plans, then do the opposite" - McLuhan.

The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything as well as they can. PXL can reduce the art-making process to its simplest incarnation, much like a child's hand puppet shadow show on the bedroom wall. Since the PXL camera was intended for children, it enables one to pursue that often desired childlike innocence in the creative process, that yearning for youthful dreams. Through Fialka's study of FINNEGANS WAKE (jesgrew.org/wake/), he uncovers a connection with PXL and James Joyce, who often realized epiphanies out of the ordinary, common, everyday occurences. Mistakes are portals of discovery. PXL THIS is percept plunder for the recent future.

As a genuine fake reality performance artist, Fialka fosters the playfulness of this tool and the exploration of media archaeology. While questioning the belief in one's own blooming world, self criticism and humor are essential elements of PXL THIS. The audience feedback is very important. One observation detailed how the Pixelator trying to be profound often comes off silly, but the silly Pixelator can often come off being profound. Another questioned, "With all the advanced digital technology, couldn't they fix the PXL picture?"

The longevity of PXL THIS and the ongoing discussion of its effects is rooted in the following ideas:

According to filmmaker Bryan Konefsky: "Pixelvision is the haiku of cinema: the minimum of means delivering the maximum of meaning. The PXL 2000 toy camera's limited image-quality forces moviemakers to focus on essentials, and thereby to produce a richly connotative cinematic experience. In fact, PXL may be the best instantiation of Stan Brakhage's luminous quote: 'The true meaning of cinema can be found between the frames.'"

"The gap is where the action is" - McLuhan.

"Artists are engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because they are the only people who live in the present." - Wyndham Lewis

"I am not trying to attibute to my self the virtues of the great designer or musician. I am simply trying to be in the habit of perceiving the present as a task, as an area to be discerned, analyzed, coped with." - McLuhan

"The artist is the antennae of the race. Art acts like radar - an early alarm system, enabling us to discover the social and psychic effects, in time beforehand, to prepare to cope with them." - Ezra Pound.

"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste." - Marcel Duchamp

Orson Welles said that a movie studio is "the biggest electric train set a kid ever had." On the other end of the spectrum, the PXL-2000 video camera is the cheesiest failed toy ever -- a train crash in the playpen. Yet, in the hands of visionary video-makers, it has become an essential tool of cutting-edge creativity.

The next three paragraphs are from Annette Michelson's chapter "Film & the Radicval Aspiration" in the 1970 book entitled FILM CULTURE READER, edited by P. Adams Sitney.

"In a country whose power and affluence are maintained by the dialectic of a war economy, in a country whose dream of revolution has been sublimated in reformism and frustrated by an equivocal prosperity, cinematic radicalism is condemned to a politics and strategy of social and aesthetic subversion.

'To live,' as Webern, quoting Holderlin, said, 'is to defend a form.' It is from the strength of its forms that cinema's essential power of negation, its 'liquidation of traditional elements in our culture,' as Benjamin put it, will derive and sustain its cathartic power.

Within the structure of our culture, ten-year-olds are now filming 8mm serials - mostly science fiction, I am told- in their own backyards. This, perhaps is the single most interesting fact about cinema. Given this new accessibility of the medium, anything can happen. Astruc's dream of the camera as fountain pen is transcended, the camera becomes a toy, and the element of play is restored to cinematic enterprise. One thinks of Melies, both Child and Father of cinema, and one rejoices in the promise of his reincarnation in the generation of little Americans making science-fiction films after school in those backyards. Here, I do believe, lies the excitement of cinema's future, its ultimate radical potential. And as Andre Breton, now a very venerable radical, has said, 'The work of art is valid if, and only if, it is aquiver with a sense of the future."

Michelson's thoughts parallel Pixelvision. She refers to the famous 1948 article, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo," in which French critic and film director Alexandre Astruc probed the arrival of a new period in the development of cinema when this medium could be as flexible as a simple fountain pen. Indeed Pixelators are hoicking up a pen-and-paper mentality as moving image artists. As well, it enables both those who declare themselves filmmakers and those who do not, to utilize intuition in reinventing everydayness into utter profundity. Pixelators can understand the potential of cinema in a way self-declared filmmakers rarely do. Experimentalist Tony Conrad wanted to make a film that stimulates what things look like with one's eyes closed. The PXL THIS Film Festival has similar goals. It is based on the statements: 'It is literally possible to do more with less' -Buckminster Fuller and 'Film will only become art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper' -Jean Cocteau. Again, it's a real pencil and paper mentality. Express yourself, and don't be afraid to break rules. Like Cocteau said, "What one should do with the young is to give them a portable camera and forbid them to observe any rules except those they invent for themselves as they go along. Let them write without being afraid of making mistakes.' PXL THIS is for all ages. Rarely is there a film festival where one can view a child's work next to the work of an industry professional with no distiction made.

"Artists want to do things that break the rules of the mainstream. Just using this camera (the PXL 2000) is breaking a kind of rule about what an image should look like." -Amy Taubin of The Village Voice & NY Times on EGG THE ARTS SHOW, PBS

PXL THIS organizer Gerry Fialka says, "PXL is the essential utensil of creation. The really creative artist does a lot with nothing. PXL THIS is based on the statements, 'It is literally possible to do more with less' -Buckminster Fuller and 'Film will only become art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper' -Jean Cocteau. It's a real pencil and paper mentality. Express yourself, and don't be afraid to break some rules. Like Cocteau said, "What one should do with the young is to give them a portable camera and forbid them to observe any rules except those they invent for themselves as they go along. Let them write without being afraid of making mistakes.' But PXL THIS is for all ages." Dave Edison, who created the music video MAINTENANCE specifically for submission to PXL THIS THREE, says, "Artists can always create, but chances to exhibit our work are often hard to find. As a videomaker and PXL 2000 owner, I regard the PXL THIS festival as a unique, exciting and irresistible opportunity. "Poet Laurent Fels proclaims, "PXL THIS is a genius idea. I always love art expressing itself with cheap means because its low price enables you to be totally free to express yourself without being threatened by producers whose high costs 'oblige' you to make something commercial." Writer Erika Suderberg called the PXL 2000 " a magic toy that restores a certain human vitality to the overpowering technology of video" in the magazine INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY, winter 1991. In PREMIERE magazine April 1993, J. Hoberman wrote, "The ultimate example of cinematic pencil and paper is surely the Fisher-Price Pixelvision video camera...the ultimate in people's video.

Clap Off They Glass Productions was started by Gerry Fialka in 1991 to support independent video-makers by sponsoring the annual PXL THIS festival, which is the oldest of its kind in the world. There are two public screenings in Los Angeles per festival; the premiere being in November, the second in February. The two hour plus program features entries from across North America spanning many genres including documentary, poetry, experimental, drama, comedy and music. PXL THIS plays to packed houses every year.

Mary Beth Crain wrote in the LA WEEKLY, "The power of PXL is somehow indisputable. The medium becomes a means of alchemically altering the most mundane realities. Blurred, off-kilter black-and-white images transcend mere out-of-focus mediocrity to become captivatingly surreal. Body parts (eyes and mouths are favorites with beginning PXL artists) acquire personalities of their own. Virtually every selection on the PXL THIS program evidences an undeniable charm and talent." Jean Cocteu said, "It is vital that the camera become a pen and that everyone should be able to express themselves through this visual medium."