CITTADEL-ARTist Lecture Series 2007: Peter Hopkins Miller

Peter Hopkins Miller

October 26, 2007

Lecture: Pistoletto Performance Theater, 21.00

Peter Hopkins Miller makes films, film installations and film performances that focus on the irreducible elements of the cinema: lenses, light, flicker, intermittence, spectacle, spectators, projectors and projection. He is enthralled with exploring the parameters of these essential ingredients, in much the same manner as the magicians and showmen who first set the early cinema into motion with a series of Kinetoscope performances and Nickelodeon installations at the beginning of the last century.
Walter Benjamin predicts that, when a technology is replaced, it first ignites into the highest super-nova state that it can be and, in so doing, revisits and resembles its promised potential, its first state. This interest in exposing an increasingly digitized world to the inner workings of the analog cinema is driven by Miller‘s fascination with the mechanical devices that ushered in the age of film. He is drawn to the light of discovery that illuminated the industrial era, to the Rube Goldberg-like apparatuses that constructed it and to how accurately we thought they would measure our world. Ultimately, Miller creates novel, poetic conjugations of the language of media, to make new marvels out of old magic.

The Cittadel-Artist Lecture Series is part of the UNIDEE in Residence Program at the Pistoletto Foundation,
Biella, Italy. For more information, please contact Chelsea Tonelli Knight at chelsea@chelseaknight.com.