Scroll as Virtual Media: Kinetic Abstraction and Projection circa 1920

Abstract

This paper considers the historical avant-garde’s use of scrolls to delineate an alternative history of experimental cinema. In 1919, Hans Richter, associated with the Bauhaus, experimented with scroll drawing titled Präludium that transformed into non-photo-indexical animation of geometric movements in Rhythmus 21. Regarded as the first European abstract cinema, Rhythmus 21 becomes architectonic through changing depths. The scroll leads to three-dimensionality for the spectator to optically experience beyond a theatrical representation. In 1914, Duncan Grant intended his Abstract Kinetic Collage to be viewed in motion through an aperture, as the spectator turns the winding mechanism by hand. Grant's scroll’s close engagement between the viewer and the machine evokes the mechanism of the kinetoscope for its exhibition of virtual movement through a peephole; Grant’s scroll, as a sculptural form that demands a cinematic perception, necessitates the performance of the viewer. I argue that this mechanism of the scroll as an expanded cinematic work resists technology and its possession of the body; it defies modernity’s instrumentalism and the conception of new media as commodities. This paper probes how the knowledge and formation of media (sculpture, cinema, performance) are re-articulated through the scroll as virtual media. Marked by “potentiality” in Brian Massumi’s term, it eventuates into ever new forms. Between the abstract and materiality, virtual and the actual, the observer-performer participates in the very formation of media. I advance that scrolls, within a network of kinetic works contemporaneous with projection experiments of the 20s, reflect the ideas of the ‘Absolute Film.’ Beyond a utopian celebration of the technologically enhanced vision, these intermedial practices imagine what cinema can be. No longer considered as “a separate art,” Grant’s scroll gestures toward a relational, virtual construction beyond the confines of the frame and medium specificity.