Möbius Stripped Bare: Some Thoughts on Loops and Repetition

Cecilia Bonilla’s video art installation In An Instant All Will Vanish is a looped film of a gymnast preparing to deliver her floor routine. The seamlessly replayed clip denies us the resolution of her actual performance, stretching a brief moment of anticipation into an eternity and inviting us into the private inner world of the lone athlete.

In An Instant All Will Vanish

2011, single chanel DVD, continuous loop, soundtrack
(Cecilia Bonilla with Matt Lewis, commissioned by Haringey Arts Council)

Exhibited as part of Fabricate, Inter Alia's current exhibition at The Parlour Gallery, this installation is intriguingly curated into the otherwise static company of photography and printed works. As an experiential piece, it is quite compelling and left me reflecting on the psychology of loops and repeated patterns. 

Upon viewing a moving image, our first instinct is to interpret narrative and continuity. In Bonilla’s piece, we feel the sense of rising tension as we wait for something to happen, but it never does. The moving image implies a passage of time and so a carefully looped video can almost create an alternate timeline for the viewer, alternately extracting and abstracting meaning like a repeated word word word word word word word word word word word word. 

Scooby and Shaggy run out of the

"repeat pan" and into the fire!

Yet despite the infinite promise of the endlessly recycled vignette, this hypnotic effect is temporary. As we begin to notice and preempt the repeated shrugs and small movements of Banilla’s subject, the spell is broken. We interpret the illusory passage of time only until the brain has enough information to recognise the loop as ultimately inanimate as a still image. Like the "repeat pan" trick of an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon, once we've seen a terrified Scooby and Shaggy fleeing past the same background door, window and potted plant for the fifth time, we realise they aren't actually going anywhere at all.  

Into the uncanny valley of the dolls with
the Nedo Repliee Q2 robot hostess

Once we recognise an image as constant and unchanging, we immediately lose the temporal dimension. It was common practice in cheaply produced television shows of the 60’s and 70’s to use still images in place of filmed action – often in cutaway scenes to establish location or draw attention to an object or plot macguffin. Even though these are typically scenes that would demonstrate no activity even if captured on film - such as a close of up an impending murder weapon for a Columbo antagonist or the gates of the Southfork ranch in Dallas – the use of such still images seems extremely jarring. The perfectly frozen nature of the still seems unnatural, wrong or somewhat unreal.  

Perhaps there is parallel to this effect of disengagement in the “uncanny valley” - a hypothesis in the field of robotics that suggests when human replicas look and act very close to, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. Our brain seems hardwired to reject the unnatural symmetry and predictability of the manufactured facsimile and the illusion of life is lost. 

Never a dull moment 
with veteran superstar 
turntablist Grandmaster Flash

The repetitive beats of dance music are especially reliant on maintaining this organic - or analog - connection with the listener as long as possible. Some of the very first popular music to feature mostly loops and samples, such as that produced by Yellow Magic Orchestra or even the wildstyle turntablism of Grandmaster Flash, was carefully structured to feature steadily layered textures of looped sounds and a progression of rhythms that are never allowed to become predictable. 

A friend who produces breakbeat music once explained how he even incorporates mistakes and almost imperceptible changes of timing into his looped drumbeats. The effect is subliminal, but serves to make identical loops feel less mechanical and more organic to the listener. Compare this artful construction of sound with a late 80’s Mark Summer B-side and notice how quickly the listener disengages from the predictable.

Thus, in order to maintain audience connection as long as possible, the use of looped material needs to be so subtle as to avoid immediate and obvious recognition of repetition, yet still establish enough delicate variation in texture to sustain the illusion of the passing time. Yet, whilst the use of loops in music and narrative moving image is designed to be as invisible as possible, for artists the creative potential of the looped image is often exploited deliberately and directly.  

Rodney Graham's Vexation Island is a 9-minute film that presents an unconscious eighteenth century shipwrecked man with a wound on his head. The man wakes, rises, notices a coconut in a nearby palm tree and shakes it to get it down. The coconut falls out of the tree and hits him on the head where his wound already was. He is promptly knocked unconscious and falls down in the same place from which he had started. The film then seamlessly starts all over again, raising questions whether or not the short film has a beginning or an end.

Similarly, although less specifically concerned with temporality, Cecilia Bonilla’s video art installation In An Instant All Will Vanish is a looped film of a gymnast preparing to deliver her floor routine. The seamlessly replayed clip denies us the resolution of her actual performance, stretching a brief moment of anticipation into an eternity and inviting us into the private inner world of the lone athlete.

In An Instant All Will Vanish

2011, single chanel DVD, continuous loop, soundtrack
(Cecilia Bonilla with Matt Lewis, commissioned by Haringey Arts Council)

Exhibited as part of Fabricate, Inter Alia's current exhibition at The Parlour Gallery, this installation is intriguingly curated into the otherwise static company of photography and printed works. As an experiential piece, it is quite compelling and left me reflecting on the psychology of loops and repeated patterns. 

Upon viewing a moving image, our first instinct is to interpret narrative and continuity. In Bonilla’s piece, we feel the sense of rising tension as we wait for something to happen, but it never does. The moving image implies a passage of time and so a carefully looped video can almost create an alternate timeline for the viewer, alternately extracting and abstracting meaning like a repeated word word word word word word word word word word word word. 

Scooby and Shaggy run out of the

"repeat pan" and into the fire!

Yet despite the infinite promise of the endlessly recycled vignette, this hypnotic effect is temporary. As we begin to notice and preempt the repeated shrugs and small movements of Banilla’s subject, the spell is broken. We interpret the illusory passage of time only until the brain has enough information to recognise the loop as ultimately inanimate as a still image. Like the "repeat pan" trick of an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon, once we've seen a terrified Scooby and Shaggy fleeing past the same background door, window and potted plant for the fifth time, we realise they aren't actually going anywhere at all.  

Into the uncanny valley of the dolls with
the Nedo Repliee Q2 robot hostess

Once we recognise an image as constant and unchanging, we immediately lose the temporal dimension. It was common practice in cheaply produced television shows of the 60’s and 70’s to use still images in place of filmed action – often in cutaway scenes to establish location or draw attention to an object or plot macguffin. Even though these are typically scenes that would demonstrate no activity even if captured on film - such as a close of up an impending murder weapon for a Columbo antagonist or the gates of the Southfork ranch in Dallas – the use of such still images seems extremely jarring. The perfectly frozen nature of the still seems unnatural, wrong or somewhat unreal.  

Perhaps there is parallel to this effect of disengagement in the “uncanny valley” - a hypothesis in the field of robotics that suggests when human replicas look and act very close to, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. Our brain seems hardwired to reject the unnatural symmetry and predictability of the manufactured facsimile and the illusion of life is lost. 

 Never a dull moment 
with veteran superstar 
turntablist Grandmaster Flash

The repetitive beats of dance music are especially reliant on maintaining this organic - or analog - connection with the listener as long as possible. Some of the very first popular music to feature mostly loops and samples, such as that produced by Yellow Magic Orchestra or even the wildstyle turntablism of Grandmaster Flash, was carefully structured to feature steadily layered textures of looped sounds and a progression of rhythms that are never allowed to become predictable. 

A friend who produces breakbeat music once explained how he even incorporates mistakes and almost imperceptible changes of timing into his looped drumbeats. The effect is subliminal, but serves to make identical loops feel less mechanical and more organic to the listener. Compare this artful construction of sound with a late 80’s Mark Summer B-side and notice how quickly the listener disengages from the predictable.

Thus, in order to maintain audience connection as long as possible, the use of looped material needs to be so subtle as to avoid immediate and obvious recognition of repetition, yet still establish enough delicate variation in texture to sustain the illusion of the passing time. Yet, whilst the use of loops in music and narrative moving image is designed to be as invisible as possible, for artists the creative potential of the looped image is often exploited deliberately and directly.  

Rodney Graham's Vexation Island is a 9-minute film that presents an unconscious eighteenth century shipwrecked man with a wound on his head. The man wakes, rises, notices a coconut in a nearby palm tree and shakes it to get it down. The coconut falls out of the tree and hits him on the head where his wound already was. He is promptly knocked unconscious and falls down in the same place from which he had started. The film then seamlessly starts all over again, raising questions whether or not the short film has a beginning or an end.