From Privy Parlor to Penny Arcade

From Privy Parlor to Penny Arcade Immersion, Interactivity and “new” media

Early American pre-Hollywood narrative cinema was one of the means by which Americans successfully battled and shed the hegemonic nineteenth-century codes of behavior exemplified most significantly by the depictions of the “proper”. Viewpoints at the turn of the century previously controlled by the examples set by painting, the aristocracy and the upper class were rendered into a finality of function for the last 100 years of American Art via the “New Media”. While formerly not acknowledging and exploring sexuality’s’

implications, the passionless and unavailable Victorian woman of painting was re-designated as the desirous and liberated American girl starving for the experiences of urban and sensual life. Pre-narrative cinema participated directly in the ideological transformation of morality and gender representation of the nude as a moving vibrant being while also addressing invisibly the possibilities and trends apparent in American art today.

In addition, the spaces in which these films were shown and the transformative spectacle they offered “to all” were indicators of a changing moral and social-economic structure. Traveling from the exclusive parlors of the privileged and wealthy to the democratic and sometimes “lewd” Nickelodeons and penny arcades populated by immigrants and the working class, the nudes of painting faded into a flickering new mode of sexual representation. Early films did not try to represent reality or an enclosed and restrictive moral world, but played on a heightened sense of interactive magic and often erotic freedom. The locations and mechanisms used by these new “magical” films addressed and impacted the viewers' perceptions and enabled a new class of Americans to recast more realistic moral codes intimately related to the changing pursuits and desires of working class urban America.

During this brief un-moralized transition period, motivated by quickly changing socio-economic and urban climates and the novelty of the new, the flickers replaced out-dated modes of propriety whilst preying on the amorphous moral codes of the middle and working class. It must be stated that the transitional function of a new medium when viewes as a determinant of a moral structure is most significantly grasped in retrospect. Until the medium becomes concretized it’s rules and regulations are not stated. Prior to the restrictions eventually adopted by the Motion Picture companies, American art was free to experiment in a new medium with an “anything goes” fervor, and without the limitations of traditional formal criteria. But unlike any other “art” form there are cultural and eventually federally enforced codes of propriety pertaining to Film and Video work, for which there might be criminal charges levied if certain depictions or acts might be performed whilst in front of the camera. Of course, in true Judeo-Christian moral codes these ratings are based upon sexuality, nudity and “swear words”. While it might be argued that there are usually no warnings at galleries for paintings of a frank nature and certainly there is no official “rating system” for the depiction of nudes or sexual activities in oil painting.

Of course, Hollywood films, similar to painting before it as moral constructors for the middle and working class represents an aristocratic class environment where only a select few of art collectors and wealthy Americans choose what is appropriate and proper for display on walls and in parlors and. This class distinction is further reenforced by the trends in early American paintings; depiction or lack thereof of women, ethnic minorities and working class American citizens remains as troubling now as it was then. Today, most would agree that the “filmmaker” is still the rich white male figure. While being defined by the same perceptual and cultural environments it is attempting to transform, it can be said that film during the preHollywood transitional time functioned as a solution to some of the questions left by the ritualized conventions of proceeding media: Painting. But one might also argue that that the freedom to make films is still forbidden to the common man, despite the explosion of online media resources, filmmaking remains the domain of the ruling class.

The American girl who was not afraid to revel in a cultural technological novelty did so while blindly foreshadowing esoteric theoretical conceptualities that are now only emerging in American and worldwide time based arts: Immersion and Interactivity. As Hollywood

now spends millions of dollars to produce momentary glimpses of “NEW” pure electro-magnetic synaesthesia, it can be said that an opportunity was somehow missed.

The Immersive and Interactive Nickelodeon

“The viewer” from “the end of Painting” patrick pagano 2005

In the late 1800's American Mutoscope and Biograph Company of New York began producing coin operated picture peep shows where a crank is turned and about 1500 cards with

photographs were displayed. This sequential flickering live action created a motion picture. In 1909 Mutoscope production of the coin operated clam shell machines stopped. It seems like the trends being experienced during the current technological revolution might serve as parallel for time in American art history where painting lost it’s definitive grip as definitive opinion maker to the time-based magical films of the nickelodeons.

Quite often, in addition to paying for the privilege to get a look into the nickelodeon, the patron would have to turn the crank wheel himself or herself and would control the speed of their experience. When the patron interacts at this level of participation the art becomes real-time, in addition it becomes an interactive experience, just like today when a computer program “becomes” a musical instrument, the operator becomes a performer. The ergonomics of a visual instrument might be not be as highly complex, but from the context of previous uses, the Nickelodeon successfully covers and employs dual roles for: moral transposition, and cultural blurring: where one representation changes smoothly into another as pictures do in the video morphing. The control is made apparent by the viewer’s interactive participation.

The Nickelodeon as a cinematic or significant moment in art

history functions as a missed indicator of what might have been more fully explored and is now being “re-discovered”. In addition, these parlors and areas required darkness so eye rests were attached to the nickelodeons effectively immersing the visitor into the “experience”. Immediately, one could identify that the new concepts of privacy and personal were slowly becoming significant during this period of American history. It must be noted how remarkably similar the technology of the nicklelodeon is when compared to the current messianic media viewing device the VR machine known as the “Oculus Rift”.

As paintings became decoration and the source of information and entertainment became a moving visual communication the initial medium, treated as an amusement and a folly, slowly transforms and replaces the former for choice of aesthetic pleasure. Access begets an activity, which is eventually more regulated and controlled than the previous medium.

“Painting” as a whole might be used to represent an aristocratic class environment where only a select few of art collectors and wealthy Americans choose what is appropriate and proper for display on walls and in parlors. This select few transforms over time into Hollywood

ratings regulations, millionaire rich white directors and it can easily be said that in certain ways visual art, as we know it has become more restrictive and controlled than its predecessors.

These problems are continuous today, as these are still our cultural problems presented in narrative cinema as the focus of a cultural unifier. A narrative foundation created by the visual depictions of Americans via replication of European ideals and aesthetics. An aesthetic not necessarily incorrect but definitely displaced and forced if simply by geological locus, but more significantly by city living, interaction and realistic desires.

Paintings is of course a vast field but it must be noted for example in American Impresionism which could be criticised as cowardly replicating current media or artistic European “styles” and artistic rules of depiction. Particularly disturbing were the wisp-like presentations of Thomas Eakins perhaps mirrored in junkie chic of contemporary millionaire fashion art models of today, but nonetheless, a further illustration of the visual harvest of improper and overly restrictive moral codes and their refelctive symmetry manifesting in popular culture.

Many of the great “masters” and their depictions of women as pre-occupied and distant generated the focus of the film, the end of painting. Early American painting lead to a sexual over-signification not created by the new mediums but imprinted implicitly by its older relatives.

When something is considered a relatively new medium, its relation to the history of fine art is still in flux. Therefore the medium inhabited a special moment, a moment before the material means and the conceptual modes of a new artistic medium have become solid. When such a medium is not yet accepted as normal part of a culture, when the medium in question and its meanings cannot be fixed to one particular formal framework, there is a transitional time of unregulated artistic purity and moral novelty.

Still from the “end of painting”

The “end of painting” attempts to comment on these social textures and perspectives. The film is prepared as a montage of ideas related to the act of viewership as it pertains to nudity, sexuality, interactivity and immersion. It functions as a metaphor for the magical freedom provided by a new more democratic medium bidding am ironic farewell to its predecessors. But in deeper focus it depicts a revelation of a certain aspect or avenue of American art making was missed during this period of time. A time before Hollywood cinema and moral structure prevented such a freedom.

It also functions as an as an agent of reminder and revelation into esoteric magical principles of sight and sound by re-casting cultural media artifacts into unique combinations. The end of painting also serves to dispose the notion of feminine purity and the maybe culturally disturbing enjoyment of the “lewd” cinema of the nickelodeon. It really states that this concept we now call “Interaction” is not new, nor is the “Immersion”, and maybe the young girl is still pre-occupied but at least now we know why.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Eds.). Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Gitelman, Lisa. And Geoffrey B. Pingree New Media, 1740-1915: Boston: The MIT Press, 2003. Gomery, Douglas. Shared Pleasures. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Gunning,Tom. "An aesthetic of astonishment: Early Film, and the (In)credulous Spectator." Art and Text 34 (1989): 818-832. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Musser,Charles. Before the Nickleodeon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Williams, Linda, Hard Core Power, Pleasure, and the 'Frenzy of the Visible'. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.