Sightlines · a concept

regime syberberg

the speech-act and visual become information/back-projection.

On screen: projection/information-space; the visual as a surface to be read

• Hitler: A Film from Germany (1978) — Back-projected photographs, paintings and film loops thrown onto screens behind performers in a fog-filled black void; rear projection reclaimed as obsolete artifice so no image can be mistaken for…
• The Andromeda Strain (1971) — The optically composited multi-panel split-screens divide the anamorphic frame into simultaneous cells used for documentary information density, turning the visual into a surface to be read.
• Network (1976) — Characters are repeatedly shown watching screens; the television signal is treated as a character and environment, converting the world into a projection/information-space to be deciphered.
• Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) — Tattersall's bright, evenly lit, plate-like photography built as a foundation layer for digital extension, with actors performing against bluescreen and unfinished CG environments — the image as a…
• All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) — Iwai lays a message-board text layer over landscape, turning the screen into a surface to be read rather than a space to be entered.
• La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2003) — The entire nineteenth-century world — street, meeting hall, church, barricade and both television studios — built inside one Montreuil hangar, the apparatus of representation standing a few meters…
• TRON: Legacy (2010) — A world built extensively from CG and staged as designed rather than found space, described as closer to industrial-design rendering than naturalism, with the flat-real-world/3D-Grid split (the…
• The House That Jack Built (2018) — Archival and found material — documentary footage, photographs, diagrams, Blake engravings, Nazi architecture, clips from von Trier's own films — composited in as a citational database, the screen…