John Whitney, Jr.: Untitled. 1967.16mm. Triple-projection. Color. 17 min. "A sense of vertigo is established... the images at times resemble gears, flowers, cosmic configurations..." Shown are two three-screen "frames" from the film.
GENE: What particular aesthetic, if any, did you follow in making this film?
JOHN: When I was eighteen I was drawn deeply into Eastern thought, Jungian psychology, the subconscious. When I think about the time when I made that footage— trying to understand what happened— I became merely an instrumentality in tune with a force, a creative energy force which expressed itself. I was able to make the films without thinking too much about what I was doing. There was just this continuous flow of energy between me, the machine, and the images. But the machine became transparent. I don't think I was conscious of any systematic manipulation or exploration of a geometrical theme, though it is undeniably in the film. I was able to be sort of comprehensive when I was making the images, whereas when I made the machine I had to be a mechanical engineer, an electronics engineer, and an optical engineer.
The relatively rectangular imagery of the previous sequence now becomes a series of ornate, almost baroque, circular forms, floral patterns, and interconnected rings, all moving inward at various rates to vanish as other rings appear, and so on. The colors at this point are extraordinarily florid, ranging the entire spectrum in kaleidoscopic brilliance and mosaic complexity. The images at times resemble gears, flowers, cosmic configurations, and dancing optical ellipses.
There is a brief pause and the second portion, or "movement," of the film begins. Throughout this section the center screen explores variations on the square, the circle, and the triangle while the flanking screens run through a dazzling repertoire of optical effects. These include mandala-like configurations around which sweep bright fingers of light in mauve and violet, bouncing curvilinear dish-shapes, starburst clusters, and clocklike metronomes in flawless synchronization with the music. The archetypal mandala symbolism of "squaring the circle" assumes dominance in the final moments of the film as all three screens accelerate in a symphony of color, design, and motion.
Today John and Michael Whitney have become computer programmers, working with digital computers in addition to the computerized, hybridized optical printer and the analogue computer. Like John Stehura, whose work we shall discuss later, Michael Whitney is involved in formulating new computer-language systems specifically for graphics problems. He speaks of "graphic integrity," and of a visual language that would approach the purity and abstraction of music. Like his father and brother, he maintains that such a quantum leap in the manipulation of visual graphics is only now possible because of the digital computer and its unprecedented powers.
One of the first efforts toward this goal is Binary Bit Patterns, a dazzling exploration of archetypal geometrical configurations that approaches déjá vu. The film was made on a PFR-3 programmable film recorder manufactured by Information International, Inc., in Santa Monica, California. The PFR-3 is a specialized visual subsystem driven by the Digital Company's small PDP-9 computer. It is a hybridized microfilm plotting system built specifically for reading film into the computer or recording information on motion-picture film. There are 16,000 possible xy coordinate points on the three-inch face of the PFR-3's cathode-ray tube. Produced with a program developed by one of the firm's employees, Michael Whitney's Binary Bit Patterns provides a deep emotional experience despite the fact that it has less kinetic activity and less image variation than the films of his brother or father.
Michael Whitney: Binary Bit Patterns. 1969. 16mm. Color. 3 min. "Squadrons of polyhedral modules come pulsating out of a black void..."
Perhaps metamorphosis best describes the effect of this film, in which quiltlike tapestries of polyhedral and crystalline figures pulsate and multiply with some kind of universal logic. In effect, if not style, it is reminiscent of Norman McLaren's Mosaic and Brakhage's The horseman, the woman, and the moth. In the McLaren film, geometrical clusters of dot-patterns collect and multiply with mathematical precision. In Binary Bit Patterns there is the same sense of mathematical play although it is not as discrete as the McLaren film; shapes are always permutating into other shapes, and an ornate, almost baroque, visual style softens any mathematical dryness. It resembles the Brakhage film because of its approximation to what Stan calls "closed-eye vision," the patterns we see when our eyes are shut. These ornate snowflake crystals flash and multiply before us with the same kind of ghostlike evasiveness as the colors that flicker across the retina of our mind's eye. Squadrons of polyhedral modules come pulsating out of a black void, growing and multiplying until the screen is a tapestry of intricate, ever-changing image-color fields. The impact is enhanced considerably by an extraordinary guitar-tape composition by Whitney and Charles Villiers. Michael not only talks about music, he composes and plays it on acoustical and electric guitars. As with Belson's work, it is difficult to distinguish whether one is seeing, hearing, or feeling Binary Bit Patterns.
Even without sound, however, the film is extraordinarily hypnotic. The boys speak of such imagery as possibly developing into a kind of "kinetic wallpaper," which could be rear-projected onto the translucent walls of a room at close range in ultra-high resolution using large format film and special lenses. One would live in a home whose very walls were alive with silent kinetic activity— not the shallow flickering of present-day color organs but rather "visual music" of the highest graphic integrity and psychic relevance.
The Whitney brothers. Left to right: John, Jr., Mark, Michael. Photo: Gene Youngblood.
GENE: Do you think of the future in connection with comput ers?
JOHN: Well let's divorce the future from technology and talk about human values. I see the nature of things today in the world and there seems to be a strong force of discontent and evil. And I wonder how can there not be some counterbalancing force, something that can apply itself to the spirit of man? And I begin to think about what is the meaning of the film work I'm doing? I believe it's possible that an inadvertent spin-off from technology will transform man into a transcendental being. There isn't much we can conceive now that can give us a clue to how it will come about. But I suspect that vision will play an important role. The eye will have a lot to do with it. It could conceivably be some external thing, which metaphysically will affect the mind and cause some transcendental experience. So with that in mind I've been thinking of ways to integrate the realist image into the nonobjective image so that a synthesis will evolve, a cinematic experience which might contribute to an evolutionary transformation of man's thought processes.