ArtHouse Memes is to be created by the UCHV Research Film Studio of Princeton University for the European Cultural Center Exhibition at the 2024 Art Biennale in Venice, which runs from May to November of 2024 and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors.

ArtHouse Memes seeks to give poetic justice to a systematically injured people via the art of cinema transformed by the fresh technical-vernacular competence of today’s youth. This project has grown out of a Research Film Studio course entitled Hidden History of Hollywood. The latter is a survey of a hidden canon of African American arthouse cinema. The class uncovers the roots of representational injustice in Hollywood and the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of D. W. Griffith’s enormously influential The Birth of a Nation (the film that led to the rebirth of the KKK). Wilson’s policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Hollywood became Wilson’s propaganda machine fully during the First World War. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This industry code, Wilson’s legacy, then became second nature to Hollywood. Arthouse Memes presents a creative subversion of the strong industrial, commercial, and propagandistic aspect of American filmmaking. The formation of the American film canon is an ongoing struggle between civil rights activism and a Jim Crow system of representation. The Princeton students of the Research Film Studio want to assist this creative struggle with sophisticated canon formation via the ArtHouse Memes exhibition. Our exhibition will give an opportunity to a global audience to be inspired by unfamiliar, systemically injured and overlooked people and by the unjustly unacknowledged, undistributed, underrated chroniclers of their lives. 

The exhibition also constitutes an avantgarde exploration of the co-productive powers of the art of filmmaking, architecture, and theater armed with cutting-edge applications of geometrical optics and sound- engineering. The roomful of technologically and artistically innovative film installations will reveal the immense potential of the art of cinema to inspire new forms of modern art that challenge our imagination and cognition through the senses. In particular, ArtHouse Memes introduces novel ways of articulating and dynamizing space by using a combination of immersive optics and directed sound as well as a hieroglyphic language of cinematic memes held together by the syntax of film montage. The common thread along the various kinds of film installations is the tension and fusion between “masking” and “iconicity”, everyday life and ritual, TikTok aesthetics and arthouse filmmaking via the multi-sensory and multimedia metamorphosis of the most memorable clips of Afro-American cinema. The ArtHouse Memes exhibition is a radical rethinking of the art of filmmaking and architecture in their relation to each other.

The project involves Princeton faculty and undergraduates, many of whom we hope will also go to Venice and take part in a global conversation on art and historical injustice.  The project builds on the success of a previous exhibition at the 2023 Architecture Biennale, which won the European Culture Centre’s University Innovation Award in a competition with MIT, Harvard and many other universities.

Standing under the center of the Angelus Novus Vault in the garden of Palazzo Mora in Venice while holding up a mobile device equipped with the Plato’s Cave App, one can see the inside of Brunelleschi’s dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore. The inside of the augmented reality dome is “painted” with the animated mashup of the original Vasari fresco depicting The Last Judgement and Kiss’s Assembly/Disassembly. The augmented reality experience via the Plato’s Cave App reveals the coincidence of the self-balancing architectonics in Brunelleschi’s curved space engineering, in Vasari’s vision of Dante’s non-Euclidean, spherical cosmology and in the perfect moral balance of The Last Judgement.

Work in progress

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the History of Philosophy

A Local Spirit - Research Film Studio Production (Erika Kiss).

The Quantum Research Films collaboration by Erika A. Kiss and Chris Tully stretches the limits of the new literacy of architectonic rhetoric. Their research films pursue persuasive and aesthetically informed dramatic data visualization used for representing quantum phenomena. Pure quantum states have no external interactions and no sense for the direction of time therefore cannot be conceptualized from the classical humanistic, single fixed-point perspective. While the single fixed point of view emerges from observing the tangible functionalism of classical physical systems, quantum thinking requires the imagination to give up the single fixed perspective of the classical observer and assume a dynamic, 360-degree, non-anthropomorphic, rather, environmental perspective in a radical break with the tangible-object fetishism that is habitual to the mind. Since classic verbal, geometrical, and cinematic representations are suited for classical Newtonian physics, we need new representational strategies to communicate quantum thinking in a perspicuous and persuasive manner. Quantum research films enable audiences to use their imagination counterintuitively, so that the mind can be adjusted to quantum systems of non-tangible relationality and non-directional spatial-temporal conceptions. Two such research film installations directed by Kiss can be viewed in Venice as part of the Architectural Biennale 2023 until November 26.

“The belief that the universe as a whole might be round (or more generally, curved) is a much more recent one. It seems to require mathematics of the 19^th century (non-Euclidean geometry) even to formulate the notion. It is therefore a considerable surprise to find, on closer reading, that Dante’s cosmology as not a simple geometrically as it first appears, but actually seems to be a so-called “closed” universe, the 3-sphere, a universe which also emerges as a cosmological solution of Einstein’s equations in general relativity theory.”

Mark Peterson: Dante and the 3-sphere in American Journal of Physics, 1979/12/01

Work in progress

A circa 50-minute full-dome research film using telescopic NASA images and original animation in the style of Kiss’s Assembly&Dissassembly (2023) to capture Dante’s non-Euclidian 3-sphere cosmology that physicists liken to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The Modular Atlantis Project is a new Princeton faculty collaboration across disciplines.