Gibson + Recoder: Projection Performance for Single and Dual 16mm Film Projection

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Gibson + Recoder: Projection Performance for Single and Dual 16mm Film Projection

Sunday September 21, 2025, 7:30 pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

Link: https://link.dice.fm/da23cc096a89

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have created one of the most sustained and sophisticated treatments of film of their generation. Rather than being wrapped in nostalgia or irony, their work is refreshingly direct in characterizing celluloid as a material that does not fit into a singular path through the projector and is not dedicated only to creating a cinematic representation of the world. – John Hanhardt, “The End(s) of Film”

“Gibson + Recoder make what is normally called expanded cinema, though a better term for what we’re going to see tonight might be “reduced” cinema. I think it was Michael Snow who once said that all you need to make a movie is duration and a beam of light, implying that cinema could exist without traditional images entirely. Our commonsense notion is that cinema is comprised of moving pictures, but there was a moment in the late 1960s and early 70s when critical thought about cinematic specificity really crystallized. From then on, “cinema” came to designate more than just moving images; it meant a certain kind of space and context for the reception of those images, and one now had to account for the layout of the auditorium, the placement of the projector behind the audience, and the screen that catches the beam of light and arrests its trajectory in order to make the image visible at all. This would also mean that the audience, seated between the projector and the screen, is itself caught up in the medium and an integral part of its functioning. Whether this idea emerged in the experiments of structural filmmakers like Snow, Frampton, and Ernie Gehr, or in film theory’s new turn toward “the apparatus” in classic texts by Baudry, Metz and Stephen Heath, clearly there was a new awareness of cinema as a complex medium with its own internal logic. Unfortunately, according to Rosalind Krauss, this was also around the same time that the Portapak video camera became popular with artists and smashed that modernist dream of specificity into little pieces.

“Gibson + Recoder began collaborating in 2000 and naturally they inherit the ambiguity of that legacy. On the one hand, they often try to take cinema back to its essentials as a space in which light and movement are projected on a flat surface, and they continue the structural-materialist tradition of making visible those aspects of the movies that we see and yet don’t see—the purely phenomenological impact of light and movement and color and sound, or the auditorium as a particular disposition of human bodies in architectural space. At the same time, they are unafraid to take their work into the art gallery as installation or sculpture, and the gallery, as we know, is a space with very different conventions of time management. Nor are they wedded to the analog projector as the end-all be-all of film art, and they have begun to experiment with DCP—as they did at the 2014 Oberhausen film festival, where they projected a random narrative film through rotating glass objects to make, as Erika Balsom put it in Artforum, an “ectoplasmic blur…that created abstract, gaseous images at times recalling 19^th century spirit photography”; then the artists forced the audience to move back and forth between separate theaters every 20 minutes, in homage to the idea of the reel changeover in standard, pre-platter theatrical projection systems. Above all, they are most interested in the projector itself as a machine with certain capabilities and attributes, including ones that are often hidden away as disturbing to the cinematic experience, such as light spill, internal cooling systems, or just the simple fact that a projector can be turned on and off in rhythmic alternation. They explore the ways in which the projector’s seemingly mechanical features are always already metaphors for seeing and thinking”  - Seth Watter

Film in its analog format is nothing without the art of projection, whereas the latter can do without the former. In this program of 16mm film performances for single and dual projection, film is not the exclusive object of attraction but the occasion for potentially disclosing the art of projection. The “performance” in our title refers to the success or failure of the film to articulate the beauty of projected light on a screen. The works in this program include the following: Still Succession, Alignments for Linea, Lightline, Corner Film, and others. Total running time: approx. 70 mins. 

Gibson + Recoder have exhibited their work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mad. Sq. Art, REDCAT, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, Light Industry, FiveMyles, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Conversations at the Edge, Walter and McBean Galleries, Memorial Art Gallery, Young Projects Gallery, Robischon Gallery, Microscope Gallery, I-Park Foundation, Exploratorium, Sundance Film Festival, National Gallery of Art, Artefact Festival, Bozar, M HKA, HMKV, Viennale, Austrian Film Museum, Metro Kinokulturhaus, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, International Film Festival Rotterdam, La Casa Encendida, Serralves Foundation, Museu do Chiado, Solar Galeria de Arte Cinemática, and EYE Film Museum. They live and work in New York.      

Special thanks to Holly Willis and USC.