Inner expansion (Birth of electronic space #9)

A recently published book solely devoted to Michael Snow‘s La Région centrale by Stéfani de Loppinot particularly underlines the context of spatial expansion — the concrete expansion to the Moon — as a very powerful motive of Snow’s work, which she also mentions was reacting, in that specific film, to the multiplication of screens. The lunar and spatial expansion of the 60’s, with its corresponding iconic image production constitutes then a backdrop to Snow’s exploration of that deserted — before and beyond human presence — region through the overreaching camera.

But one might take this historical and cultural contextualization further and state that indeed Snow’s film, while seismographically capturing the signs of those times, is — as the “birth of electronic space” it expresses — a “response” in advance to the failure that exterior expansion would amount to. What the then created electronic space represents is a so different inner expansion, one of technological features that incarnated in the so-called “virtual space” we all more or less live in. So, the profusion of movement in that no-man landscape was in fact the admittance of a failure, as Snow well stated in interviews, the failure of the human in grasping a space to its dimensions. [to be continued]