TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

In Light Is Waiting (2007), Michael Robinson re-uses a sequence from an episode (no doubt nicked from a VHS cassette) of the family television series Full House, giving it a radical visual treatment: blinking, visual distortion, analogue video blurring, superimposition, solarization, alternating coloured filters, extreme slow motion, etc. Nevertheless, the most significant effect is the mirror image (in particular during a long concert sequence in Hawaii) which transforms the happiness of the original scene into a true hallucinatory nightmare. In his own way, Robinson condenses into the same film a whole range of techniques specific to film stock and to a certain found footage tradition (blinking, repetition and superimposition using an optical printer, step printing), while adding to them effects specific to analogue video – among them effects similar to those produced by the synthesizer Abe-Paik, created in 1969-71 and used most notably to make Global Groove (Nam June Paik, 1973) – along with specifically digital effects. In this way, digital technology makes it possible to create rapid visual permutations (superimpositions, colour reversals, etc.) and provides flexibility in image manipulation variations. Light Is Waiting thus pushes the technology (and the viewer’s sensibility) to a kind of limit. Although a certain number of the procedures used can technically be possible on film stock or on analogue video, their accumulation and the possibility of carrying out this doubling series without “generational” loss are a specific feature of the digital image’s reproducibility and synthesizing capabilities.