Moving Image Award 2020

Casey Reas & Jan St. Werner - Compressed Cinema (USA)

Compressed Cinema is the series title for five new audiovisual works completing in 2020. The video images were created by Casey REAS, and each work has a stereo audio track composed by Jan St. Werner.

The ideal exhibition space for the videos is five sound-isolated black box rooms with comfortable floor seating. The audiovisual works are projected at wall scale. The sound is played back through a high quality stereo loudspeaker system. Visitors can move back and forth between rooms and can spend as much time as they want with one piece to experience it differently with each loop. The scale of the videos and the quality of the audio system are essential to experiencing the works.

The videos may also be screened from start to finish in a cinema. Any number can be screened at one time and in any order. They can be viewed as part of a film/video program. The videos don’t have titles or credits; they begin and end abruptly as intended by the artists.

The images for the videos were derived from a set of “film stills” created by Casey REAS with generative adversarial networks (GANs). This process is documented in REAS’ 2020 book Making Pictures with Generative Adversarial Networks.